THEOPNEUSTIA. 



THE BIBLE: 

ITS DIVIDE omanr 

AND 

INSPIRATION, 

DEDUCED FROM 

INTERNAL EVIDENCE, AND THE TESTIMONIES OP 
NATURE, HISTORY AND SCIENCE. 

By L. GAUSSEN, D.D., 

OF SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY, OEATOIEE, GENEVA. 



New and Hevised Edition, with Analysis and Topical Index. 



CINCINNATI : 
GrEORG-E S. JBl^J^NCJ^A^TiJD Sc CO. 

39 WEST FOURTH STREET. 

BOSTON: GOULD & LINCOLN. 

NEW YORK: SHELDON & CO. 

1867. 






JUL 20 ^92SP 

Amaricaa ihivMii^ 



TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. 



Soon after the first publication of the Theopneustiay the late 
Rev. Dr. Welsh wrote to me, urging me to translate it for 
the press. A series of other engagements prevented me from 
doing so for several years. At last, in ansvrer to a call for a 
cheaper and less bulky translation than one that had mean- 
while appeared in London, I applied myself to the task, and 
had completed it before seeing what my predecessor had pub- 
lished in the south. The present translation being from the 
latest French edition, has the advantage of all the author's 
improved arrangement. 

The importance of the subject, the high character of ihe 
author, and the admirable manner in which he has acquitted 
himself, required that no ordinary pains should be bestowed 
in doing him justice. These pains I have not spared. 

I have endeavoured, as far as I could, to give the texts 
quoted from Scripture in the precise words of our authorized 
version, and to secure the utmost possible correctness in the 
references. The headings at the top of the pages will, it is 
hoped, be of considerable use to the student. 

After consulting an eminent authority as to the propriety 

of the change, "plenary inspiration," "divine inspiration," 

or ** verbal inspiration," have been substituted throughout 

(iii) 



IV TRANSLATORS ?REFACE. 

for the term Theopneustia, borrowed by the author from the 
Greek, and retained on the title-page. It was thought that 
the frequent recurrence of so unusual a word might repel 
ordinary readers, and make it appear that the book was ex- 
clusively for the learned. 

At a time when almost all reh'gious controversies seem to 
turn, more or less, on the question, How far the Holy Scrip- 
tures are inspired? and when persons of all ranks and classes 
are called upon to arm themselves against various errors 
having their root in false or inadequate views on this subject, 
it seems hardly possible to overrate the value of the work 
now before the reader. Nor is it only as a work of contro- 
versy that it is invaluable. It is imbued throughout with a 
spirit of affectionate earnestness and glowing piety, which, 
even when it makes the greatest demand on the intellect, 
never suffers the heart to remain cold. Add to this, the 
wonderful copiousness of the illustrations, which the author 
seems to borrow with equal ease from the simplest objects 
in nature, the deepest wells of learning, the remotest deduc- 
tions of science, and the history at once of the most ancient 
and most modern times. In short, as we accompany him from 
page to page and chapter to chapter, we seem not so much 
to be reading a book, as to be listening to a devout and ac- 
complislied friend, expatiating on a favourite subject — a sub- 
ject of tlie very greatest importance, and one amid all the 
details of which he is quite at home. 

DAVID D. SCOTT. 
Glasgow. 



GENERAL CONTENTS. 



Paob 

Translator's Preface, ..... v 

Prefatort Observations, ..... 5 

CHAPTER I. 

DEFINITION OF THE THEOPNEUSTIA, OR DIVINE INSPIRATION, 

Section L ..... . 



Section II. . .... 

Section III. ...... 

Section IV. ...... 

Section V.— On the Individuality of the Sacred Writers, 



CHAPTER II. 

SCRIPTURAL PROOF OF THE DIVINE INSPIRATION. 

Section I. — All Scripture is Divinely Inspired, . . 58 

Section II. — All the Prophetic Utterances are given by God, 59 
Section HI. — All the Scriptures of the Old Testament are Pro- 
phetic, . ...... 67 

Section IV. — All the Scriptures of the New Testament are Pro- 
phetic, . ...... 73 

Section V. — The Examples of the Apostles, and of their Master, 
attest that in their view all the Words of the Holy Books 
are given by God, ...... 89 

CHAPTER III. 

BRIEF DIDACTIC ABSTRACT OF THE DOCTRINE OF THE DIVINE 
INSPIRATION. 

Section I.— Catechetical Sketch of the Main Points of the 
Doctrine, ...... 106 

Section II. — On the Adversaries and Defenders of the Doc- 
trine, ....... 139 

(v) 



VI GENERAL CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER IV. 



Pan 



EXAMINAIION OF OBJECTIONS. 

Section I. — The Translations, .... 153 

Section II. — Use of the Septuagint Translation, • , 161 

Section III,— The Various Readings, . , , 164 

Section IV. — Errors of Reasoning or of Doctrine, . . 197 

Section V. — Errors in the Narratives — Contradictions in the 

Facts, ....... 207 

Section VI. — Errors contrary to Natural Philosophy, . 244 

Section VII. — The Declarations of Paul himself, . . 271 

CHAPTER V. 

EXAMINATION OF EVASIONS. 

Section I. — Might not Inspiration pertain to the Thoughts only, 
without extending to the Words ? . . . 275 

Section II. — Should we except from Inspiration the His- 
torical Boots ? , . . . . 286 

Section III. — Will the apparent insignificance of certain De- 
tails in the Bible authorize their being excepted from Ingnira- 
tion.3 306 

CHAPTER VI. 

ON SACRED CRITICISM, IN THE RELATIONS IT BEARS TO DIVINE 
INSPIRATION. 

Section I. — Sacred Criticism is a Scientific Inquirer, and not 
a Judge, . ...... 324 

Section II. — Let Sacred Criticism be an Historian, not a Sooth- 
sayer, ....... 330 

Section III,— Sacred Criticism is the Doorkeeper of the Temple, 
not its God, ...... 336 

CHAPTER VII. 

CONCLUSION. 

Section I.— Retrospect, . . . • • 349 

Section II. •••••• • 355 



ALPHABETICAL INDEX OF CONTENTS. 

FOR MINUTI^ AND REPEATED REFERENCES 
CHIEFLY USEFUL. 

Pag« 
Adversaries of Inspiration, • • • • 139-145 

Agobard referred to, . , • , , . 140 

Airey, Illustration from, . • • • • 251 

Ambrose (St) quoted, . . . • . 304 

Ammon on miraculous facts, • , • . 144 

Angels, their nature, office, &c., . , . 289-292 

Anomeans oppose Inspiration, .... 141 

Apocrypha in Old Testament, not in New Testament, . 134 
Apostles are prophets, &c. (See Chap. XL Analysis), . 134 
Astrology, ....... 256 

A thenagoras quoted, ..... 147 

Augustine (St) quoted, 136 (and n. 3), 254, 305— Referred to, 
150- On Matt, xsvii. 9, 10 —216— Illustration from, 345. 
Authenticity of Scripture an historical question, 129, 131, 138 

Baumgarten on Inspiration, ..... 108 
BeUarmine on authority of Scripture, • . . 136 

Bengel referred to, 167,168,195 

„ onlJohnv.6, 7, 193 

Bernard (St) quoted, ..... 31 

Bible neither human nor fallible (Pref. Obs.)-, 7 — Its Divine 

brevity, 296 — Its Divine charm, majesty, beauty, 

53, 56, 293, 341 — Ite growing radiance, 359 — Its own 

witness, 340— Divine care of, 167. 

Bible Society condemned by Pope Leo XII. . . 123 

Buchanan, — the Malabar Roll, .... 171 

Castellio, * 143, 210 

Celsus 208 

Chateaubriand, Illustration from, . . . .49 

Chinese, their cosmogony, ..... 253 

Christ, our Lord Jesus— how he quoted Scriptures, 93 — Com- 
pared to the written Word, 54 — Resurrection, &c. (Sen 
Scripture Index.) 
Chrysostom, (St), quoted, . . .71 {n. 2), 357 (». 3) 

Church, Ancient, xlefends inspiration, 145-152— Catholic, care 
of New Testament, 132— Of Corinth. (See Scripture 
Index).— Of Rome. (See Rome, Trent, &c.) 
Claud quoted, ...... 126 

(vii) 



VUl ALPHABETICAL INDEX OF CONTENTS. 

Page 
Columbus referred to, . . • , . 265 

Creissenach (Dr) quoted, .... 120 (n. 2.) 
Criticism. (See Chap. VI. Analysis). 

D'Alembert quoted, ..•••• 256 

Decalogue, ....... 302 

Defenders of Inspiration, .... 145-152 

Definition of Inspiration in persons, . . 23, 34, 106 

Degrees of Inspiration, four supposed, 27, 107 — In persons, 48 

Deluge, 266 (n.l) 

Desmarets quoted, ...... 56 

Details, insignificant. (See Chap. V. Sect. m. Analysis). 

De Wette rejects Inspiration, . . .26, 144, 202 

Dick (Dr), on Inspiration, . . . . 27, 40, 209 

Direction, Inspiration of, . . . . . 27, 107 

Doctrine, Errors of. (See Chap. IV. Sect. IV. Analysis.) 

Edwards (President) quoted, .... 32 

Eichbom, rationalistic doctrine of prophecy, 144 — ^Referred 

to, 169, 332, 357. 
Elevation, Inspiration of, . . . . 27, 107 

Epimenides, ....... 62 

Epiphanius (St) quoted, ..... 141 

Erasmus (and others) on Luke i. 1-4, ... 87 

Eusebius quoted (Miltiades in), 88 — Referred to, . . 150 

Evasions examined. (See Chap. V. Analysis.) 
Excitation, Inspiration is not, . . . .47 

Existence of Inspiration rejected, 26— Maintained, 28, 58. 
Ecstasy, Inspiration not imply, ... 88, 147 

Facts, contradictions in. (See Chap. IV. Sect. V. Analysis). 

Fanatics oppose Inspiration, .... 143 

France, Churches of, confession 4th Article, . . 129 

Freiburg, illustration from organist of cathedral, , 51 

Galen quoted, . ..... 326 

Galileo referred to, . . . . . . 255 

Gieseler (Dr) on sources of Gospels, . . , 332 

Gleig (Bishop) on sources of Gospels, . . . 335 

Gnostics opposed Iu6])iration, .... 141 

Griesbach referred to, 168 — His corrections, 176 — On Ep, 
Romans and Galatians, 181-188— And SchoLz, 190. 

Haldane quoted, ..... 311 (n. 1) 

Hengstenberg meets contradictions, 209 — On resurrec- 
tion, 223, 224 (TO. 1). 
Herschel (Sir John), illustration from, . . . 251 

Hindus, their cosmogony, .... 253, 254 

Historical books not excepted from Inspiration. (See Chap. 
V. -Sect. 11.) 



ALPHABETICAL INDEX OF CONTENTS. 



Pag« 
Home referred to, . . . . • 163, 209 

Hug denies Inspiration, 144— Referred to, . • 168, 332 

Ignorance, human, and vanity, .... 204 

lUumination and Inspiration, . . . 109-125 

Impulsion, part of Divine action in Inspiration, . . 125 

Individuality of writers, . . .39, 41, 44, 126, 350 

Inspiration. (See Existence, &c.) — ^A doctrine and fact, 
24, 36— Asserted, not explained, 25, 42 — Not learned and 
abstruse, but simple, (Pref. Obs.), 5 — Of book, not 
writer, 47, 111, 116, 281, 349. 
Integrity of (present) copies, . . . 164, &o. 

Intermittent Inspiration, 45, 351 — (By intervals), 112, 113. 
Irenseus (St) quoted, . . 125, 146, 150, 326, 328, 383 

Jerome (St) on Apocrypha, 134, 161 (and n. 1) — On Inspi- 
ration, 140, 198— Referred to, 149, 307. 

Jews confound Inspiration and illumination, 119 — Talmud 
(See Tabnudists), 119, 163 {n. 1), 296, 356— Old Testa- 
ment in their care, 131, 132. 

Josephus quoted, 24, 87 {n. 4), 127 (and n. 8), 128, 132, 133, 
142 (n 2) 230, 240, 241. 

Jophua. (See Scripture Index.) 

Judgment, precipitate causes of, . , . 211-243 

Julius Africanus quoted and referred to, • • 148, 244 

Justin Martyr quoted, - . . • • • 147 

Kennicott (Dr), 168,169 

Known already. Illusion from, . . . .48 

Koran, absurdities of, 254— Compared with Bible, 55, 294, 295. 

Lactantius quoted, ...... 254 

Language popular in Scripture, 250 — The mirror of the 

soul, 277 

Latins. (See Rome, Church of.) 

Le Clerc admitspartial Inspiration, 144— On Gospel (Matthew), 332 

Lee (Dr) quoted, ...... 173 

Luke, Apostle and Prophet, 83-87— On Luke ii. 1, 2, . 230 
Luther, his touchstone, 130-— Illustration from, 345. 

Maccabees, Book of, . . . . « • 166 

M'Caul quoted, .•..., 119 

Mahomet opposes Inspiration (and see Koran), . . 142 

Manicheans oppose Inspiration, .... 141 

Mark, Apostle and Prophet, ..... 83-87 

Marsh (Bishop of Llandaff) on Gospel of Matthew, , 332 

Martin. (See Osterwald and Martin.) 

Mary, B V., . . . . • . .300 

Massoretics, ....... 172 

Michaelis denies Inspiration, 27, 86, 144r— OnMatt. i., ii., 32.5, 



ALPHABETICAL INDEX OF CONTENTS. 



Pag« 

332- On Matt. xi. 9, 11-80, 111 {n. 4)— On authenti- 
city, 82, 138 — On modern researches, 168. 

Middleton (Bishop) on 1 John v. 6, 7, . . . 193 

Mornay quoted, . . .... 29.5 

Moses, not excepted from Inspiration, ... 68 

Muses Muimonides, ...... 142 

Mysticism, ....... 358 

Narratives, errors in. (See Chap. IV. Sect. V. Analysis.) 
Naturalists, example of, . . . . . 327 

Newton (Sir Isaac), illustration from, 29, 250— Referred to, 263 

Objections examined. (See Chap. IV. Analysis.) 
Origen quoted, . . . . . 146,147, 30J, 327 

Osterwaldand Martin referred to, 162, 233 — Illustration from, 
175-Compared, 177, 178. 

Partial Inspiration, (Pref. Obs.), .... 9-11 
Pascal, illustration from, . . . . .29 

Paul, Apostle and Prophet, 79-82— On Inspiration (Ep. 

Hebrew.s), 89-91 -Declarations. (See Chap. IV. S.ct. 

VII. Analysis) - Details, insignificant. (See Chap. V., 

Sect. III. Analysis.) 
Peter Martyr quoted, . . . . 210,243 

Peter (ttt), qucere his episcopate, popedom, primacy, or 

presence at Kbme, ..... 320 

Philo Judseus quoted, ..... 24 

Philosophy, errors in. (See Chap. IV. Sect. VI. Analysis.) — 

No physical error, ..... 253 

Plato, Timseus of, quoted, . . . . .60 

Plenitude of Inspiration denied, 26 — Asserted (Pref. Obs.), 

7, 67, 105, 139. 
Porphyry, ....... 203 

Prophets, prophecy, &c. (See Chap. II.) • 

Protestantism impure, ..... 357 

Racine, Illustr; tion from, ..... 46 

Rationalists degrade Bible, 118 — Oppose Inspiration, 144. 
Jleadings, various. (!^ee Chap. IV. Sect. ill. Analysis ) 
lleasouiiig, errors in. ( Do. do. IV. do. ) 

Reformed churches, test of Inspiration. . . . 129 

Religion and theology compared and defined (Pref. Obs.), 13 

Religion, two forms of, ... . 355, 3.^6 

Resurrection of our Lord. (See Scripture Index.) 
Rome, Church of, chffering views on Inspiration, 120— Regard 
to tradition and ojiposition InsjMration, 124, l-i^v ;> 6 — 
On authority of Scrii)ture, 130 billy infallibility of, 162. 
(See Trent, Council of.) 
RosenuuiUer o})posc8 Inspiration, . . . .144 

Rout>seau quoted, ...... 308 



ALFHAEETICAL INDEX OF CONTENTS. 



rage 
Rudelbach quoted, . . .36, (n. 1), 140, 145, 149 

Schleiermacher rejects Inspiration, ... 26, 143 

Scholz, 168, 190-194 

Semler rejects Inspiration, ..... 144 
Septuagint referred to, 62 (n. 4)— Use in New Testament. 

(See Chap. TV. Sect. II. Analysis.) 
Smith (Dr Pye) denies plenitude of Inspiration, . . 27, 210 

Socinus opposes Inspiration, .... 143, 210, 357 
Strauss quoted, 54— Opposes inspiration, 202, 203, 208 (and 

n. 3). 357, 
Suggestion, Inspiration of, 28, 107— Part of Divine action in 

Inspiration, 125. 
Sumner s ( Abp. of Canterbury) Records of Creation quoted, 264 
Superintendence, Inspiration of, . . . 27, 107 

Supper, the Lord's, ...... 303 

Talmudists (see also Jews) oppose Inspiration, . . 142 

Texts, original and translated. . . . 155-160, 179 

Theodore (of Mopsuestia) denies Inspiration, . 27, 139, 141 

Theology and religion compared and defined (Pref. Obs.), 13 

Theology, false, ancient, and modern, . . . 253 

Theophilus quoted, ..... 342 (and n.l) 
Theophylact quoted, ..... (71 n. 2) 

Theopneustia. (See Inspiration.) 
Timothy. (See Scripture Index.) 
Translations. (See Cbap. IV. Sect. I.) 

Trent, Council of, quoted, . . 121, 134 (and w. 4), 161, 296 

Turretine quoted, ..... 143, 210 

Twesten (Dr) denies plenitude of Inspiration, quoted, 27, 28, 40, 

41, 130, 210 
Universality of Inspiration denied, 26— Maintained, 28, 46, 

58, 66, 350. 
Variations, unimportant, .... 169, 170 

Verbal Inspiration, example of our Lord, 103, 104, 105 — 
Maintained by Ancient Church, 148 — No objection from 
translations, 154 — The evasion examined, 275-286 — Re- 
trospect, 349, 352. 
Virgilius, illustration from, . . - . . . 255 

"Whitby on Matt, xxvii. 9, 10, . . . . 217 

Wilson (Bp. of Calcutta) denies plenitude of Inspiration, 27, 39, 210 
"Wirgmann's divarication of New Testament, . . 202 

"Wiseman's discourse quoted, .... 169 

"Wordsworth on Titus ii. 13, . . . . 191 {n. 2) 

"Zachariae, son of Barachiaa," • • , 237-241 



SCRIPTUEE TXDEX 

OF PASSAGES MORE PARTICULARLY DISCUSSEIX 

U> = COMPARISON WITH OTHEK PASSAGES. 



Chap. Genesis. 


Page 


xlvi 27, w. 


215 


Exodus. 




XX. 17, w. 


302 


ISTCMBEBS. 




xxiii. 16, 


284 


DEUTEBONOilY 




V. 21, w. 


302 


X. 22, w. 


215 


Joshua. 




X. 12, 


245,267 


2 Samuel. 




xxiv. 9, w. 


215 


1 Kings. 




ix. 28, v>. 


215 


1 Chronicles. 




xxi. 5, w. 


215 


2 Chbonicles. 




viii. 18, w. 


215 


xxiv. 21, w. 


237 


Zechabiah. 




xi. 13, w. 


216 


Matthew. 




... 325, 


331, 332 


i. 17, V. 


229 


ir. 


96 



Chap. 



Matthew. 



iv. 5, w. 
v., w. 
V. 18, w. 
vi. 9, w. 
xi. 9-ll,«;. 
xiv. 20, w. 
XV. 37, w. 
XX. 30, w. 
xxii. 31, 32, 
xxii. 43, 

xxiii. 35, 36, w.... 
xxvii. 5, '?4k 
xxvii. 9, 10, w. ... 
xxvii. 46, 
xxvii. 45, 46, w, 
xxviii., w. 



Mabk. 



vi. 43, w. 
viii. 8, w. 
X. 46, 10. 
xi. 12-14, 
XV. 33, 34, w. 
xvi., w. 
xvi. 5, w. 



Luke. 



1.1-4, 
ii. 1, 2, 



Page 

232 

235 

102 

235 

80 

234 

234 

213 

98 

99 

237 

214 

216 

100 

237 

218-229 



234 
234 
213 
241 
237 
218-229 
212 



86,87 
230 



(xiii) 



XIV 



(SCRIPTURE INDEX. 



Chap. 


Luke. 


Page 


Chap. 


Romans. 


Page 


ii. 41, 


... 


96 


xvi. 


... 


317 


iii. 23, w. 


... 


229 


xvi.25. 


... 


79 


iv. 5, w. 
iv. 16, 


... 


232 

97 

235 


1 Corinthians. 




vi., w. 




vii. 10, 12 


,25, ... 


271 


ix. 17, w. 




234 


xii. 4^11, 


... 


64 


xi. 2. w. 


... 


235 


xii. 28, 


... 


79 


xvi. 17, w. 


••• 


102 


2 Corinth TANS. 




xviji. 35, v). 


... 


213 


xii. 2, 




274 


xxiii. 44, 45 


t9.... 


237 








xxiv.. w. 


... 


218-229 




Galatians 




xxiv. 4, v}. 


... 


212 




... 


188 


xxiv. 27, 


... 


101 


iii. 16, 


... 


205 


xxiv. 44, 


... 


68 




1 Timothy 






John. 




V.23, 


... 


315 


vi. 13, V3. 
X. 35, 




234 
103, 105 




2 Timothy. 




xi. 51, 




284 


iii. 16, 


...23,24,58, 


127 


xiii. 8, 


..• 


313 


iv. 13, 21, 


... 


306 


xix. 23, 24, 
XX., w. 


... 


308 
218 229 


ii. 13, 


Titus. 


191 


i. 18, V). 
vii. 17, W. 


Acts. 


214 
215 


i.20,21, 


2 Peteb, 

59, ^, 107, 285 


\'ii. 38, 


... 


68 


iii. 2, 
iii. 15, 16, 


74 
... 73, 74. 85 


Romans. 










i.-xvi. 


••• 


181 




1 John. 




iu. 2, 


•«• 


68 


v.7,8. 


191, 


192 



ANALYSIS. 



CHAPTER I. 

DEFINITION OF THEOPNEUSTIA, 

Page 
Sect. I. — Theopneustia defined, . . . , 23 

Sect. II. — Theopneustia asserted, not explained, . , 25 

Sect. III. — Theopneustia rejected as to its existence, tmiver- 

flality, plenitude, .... 26 

By some four degrees distinguished, viz,, — 
Superintendence, elevatioa, direction, 
suggestion, .... 27 

This book designs, therefore, to prove exist- 
ence, universality, plenitude, . . 28 
Man's part in God's book; illustration from 
Pascal and Newton, ... 29 
Sect. IV. — Theopneustia [further) defined and stated, . 34 
Neither a priori (" necessary"), nor from 
beauty, wisdom, &c?, of Scripttu'es, but 
solely on divine declaration, . . 35 
This addressed, of course, to those who ad- 
mit Scriptures, .... 36 
Scriptures declare their own Inspiration, 36 
Sect. V. — Individuality of sacred writers, . . 38 
False inferences; difi'erent statements there- 
on, . • . ♦ . • .39 
Eeply (1.) Human individuality acknow- 
ledged, ... 41 
(2.) God's acting, ... 42 
(3.) What is God's style? . . 43 
(4.) Human personality how employed, 44 
(5.) Inconsistency of objection to (al- 
leged) difficulty, . . 45 
(6.) Intermittent Inspiration is com- 
plicated, rash, childish, . 45 
(7.) "All Scripture is given by in- 
spiration of God," . . 46 
(8.^ Inspiration in hook, not in man, 47 
Three illusions : excitation, de- 
gree, already known, . 47 
(9, 10.) Diflfdrent styles — one God: illus- 
tration from music, Preiburg, 49 

(XV) 



XVI ANALYSTS. 



Pago 
(11.) This individuality gives beauty, 

variety, unity, harmony, , 63 

CHAPTER II. 

SCRIPTURAL PROOF OF THEOPNEUSTIA. 

Sect. I. — All Scripture is divinely inspired (2 Tim. 

iii.l6), . . _ . . .58 

Sect. II. — All prophetic utterances given by God, . 59 

2 Peter i. 20, 21, . . . .59 

What is a prophet ? ... 60 

The prophets, in Bible, speak the words of 

Jehovah, .... 61 

False prophets, .... 62 
Scripture prophecies "the words of God in 

mouth of man," .... 63 
Scripture prophecies sometimes without 
foresight, knowledge, or even desire, of 

prophets, .... 63 

Occasional gift of prophecy, . . 64 

Church of Corinth had (1 Ep. xii. 4-11),— 64 

(1.) Diversities of gifts, . . 64 

(2.) Divided severally, . . 65 

(3) The subject of desire, . . 65 

(4.) Different forms, . . . 65 

(5. ) Words of Holy Ghost spoken by man, 65 

(6.) Of long continuance, . . 65 

(7.) Prophets not absolutely passive, 66 
Be7ice, 2 Peter i. 20, 21 establishes plenary 
and entire Inspiration of Scnptures : these 

are written prophecies, ... 66 

Sect, m.— All Old Testament Scriptures are prophetic, . 67 

The whole book is the " Word of God," . 67 

(«) " Moses" may not be excepted, . 68 

(^) Nor " the Prophets," . - 69 

(y) Nor " the Psahns." . . 71 
Eence, the whole Old Testament is a wntten 

prophecy, .... 71 

Sect. IY.— All New Testament Scriptures are prophetic, 73 

2 Peter iii. 15, 16, ... 73 
2 Peter iii 2 :— hence, W7'itings of Apostles 

are written prophecies, ... 74 
Writers of New Tstamcnt superior to 
writers of Old 'J\ tament, in — 

(a.) Mission, . • • 'J** 

(/3) Promises, .... 75 

{y) Gifts, - ' ' • It 

(2) Rank, . . , . . <9 

Apostle? are prophets (Rom. xvi. 25); more 

than prophets (,Matt. xi. 9, 11); above the 

prophets {,1 Cor. xii. 28), . . 79 



ANALYSIS. 



Page 

"Were Mark and Luke prophets ? . » 83 

Luke i. 1-4, . . . .86 

Inspiration does not imply ecstasy, . 88 

Sect. V. — Testimony of Apostles and the Lord Jesus Christ, 89 

St Paul (Ep. Hebrews), ... 90 

TJ^e Lord Jesus Christ, . .92 

(Unconscious blasphemy of rationalists), 95 

(«^ In the temple (Lnke ii. 41), . 96 

(/3) ihe Lemptation (Matt, iv.), . 96 

ly) At ISTaza.eth (Luke iv. 16), . 97 

(5) Before Sadducees (Matt xxii. 32), 98 

(g) Before Pharisees (Matt. xxii. 43), 99 

(i) On the cross (Matt, xxvii. 46), . 100 

(*j) After resurrection (Luke xxiv. 27), 101 

{0} Luke xvi. 17, and Matt. v. 18., . 102 

(i) John X. 22-40, . . .103 

(«) The Scripture cannot be broken 

(John X. 35), - . .103 

Hence, Plenakt veebal Inspi- 

EATION, . . . 105 

CHAPTER III. 

DIDACTIO ABSTRACT OP THE DOOTEINE. 

SSOT. I. — Catechetical sketch, .... 106 

i.-iii. Inspiration: its effects, . . 106 

iv.-vi. Degrees of Inspiration : mediate revela- 
tion, .... 107 
vii.-xi. Inspiration and illumination, , 109 
(These differ in kind, characteristics, 
degree.) 
xii. Miraculous gifts intermittent : Inspi- 
ration by intervals, . . 113 
xiii. Language fallible when uninspired, . 115 
xiv., XV. Inspiration differs from illumination 
in essence : infallibility of sacred 
writers depends solely on Inspiration: 
Inspired words, miraculous, words of 
God : our faithnot on illumination of 
writers, but on Inspiration of writ- 
ings : one has degrees, other has no 
degrees : it goes to heart of God, . 116 
xvi. Much harm from confusion hereon; 
either the Word of God degraded, or 
uninspired writings exalted, . 117 
Xvii., xviii. Rationalists the former, Jews and 

Latins the latter, . , . 118 

xix., XX. The Jewish Talmud, . . . 119 

xxi., xxii. Papal Traditions, . , . 120 

xxiii.-xxvi. Inspiration shews impulsion (wilD and 



ANALYSIS. 



Page 
suggestion : internal and external 
(understanding): writers werr living 
pens: they (and the occasion) pre- 
pared by God ; their individuality 
sanctified, .... 125 
xxvii. All the Scripture (Old Testament and 

New Testament) equally Inspired, 126 

xxviii. The autherdicHy of each hook an histori- 
cal question. . . . 129 
xxix., XXX. Test of Reformed Churches ; of Luther, 129 
xxxi.-xxxv. Jews bear testimony to authenticity of 

each book of Old Testament, . 130 

xxxvi., xxxvii., ( Catholic Church bears testimony to each 

xxxix. \ book of New Testament, . . 132 

, xxxviii. Apocrypha ; no addition to New Testa- 

ment, .... 133 

xl.-xliii. Church a depositary of Scripture : that 
(an historical document) declares its 
own PLENARY INSPIRATION, . 136 

Sect. II. — Adversaries and defenders, . . . 139 
xliv. Adversaries — to 8th century among Heretics 

(except Theodore of Mopsuestia), . 139 

2d century. Gnostics, . . . 141 

3d „ Manicheans, . . . 141 

4th „ Anomeans, . . . 141 

5th „ Theodore of Mopsuestia, . 141 

7th „ Mahomet, . . .142 

12tli and 13th „ Talmudistic Jews — Moses Mai- 

monides, . . . 142 
16th „ Socinus and Castellio, . 143 
17th „ Fanatics, Latins, Rationalists, 143 
18th „ Rationalists, . . . 144 
xlv. Defenders— \fho\Q Church to days of Refor- 
mation, .... 145 
Eudelbach gives REVIEW OF FIRST EIGHT 
CENTURIES ; proves that,— 
(1.) Ancient church teaches Old and New 
Testament Canonical writings In- 
spired, .... 145 
(2.) Teaches infallibility of Scripture, 146 
(3.) „ nothing erroneous, useless, 

superfluous therein, . 146 
(4.) „ doctrine same throughout, 146 
(5.) ,, passive intelligent Inspiration, 146 
(6.) „ inecstatic Inspiration, . 147 
(7, 8.) ,, verbal Inspiration, . 148 
(9.) She respectfully quotes, kc. ; re- 
conciles, &c., . . . 148 
(10.^ „ admits liberty in phenomena, 149 
(11.) „ fixes relatione; proves; replies. liiO 



ANALYSIS. 



CHAPTER IV. 

OBJECTIONS EXAMINED. 

Page 
Sect. I. — Translations, . . . . , 153 

Are they inspired ? . . . . 154 

Insignificant objection : really no objection ; 
not bearing against fact of verbal Inspira- 
tion ; only contests advantage, . . 354 
Difference of oi'iginal and translated text, 155 
(1. ) Sacred writers rendered Divine thoughts 

by sensible symbols, . . 155 

(2.) Original text written at given moment 

to single man, . . . 157 

(3.) Translators learned; sacred writers illi- 
terate, .... 157 
(4.) Thought of God only found in expres- 
sion of sacred writer ; but translators 
have Divine text, . . . 158 
(5.) Possible faults as to original text bound- 
less, as to translation limited, . 159 
Hence, limitation of doubt, . 160 
God required for one, Man sufficed 
for other, . . . 161 
Sect. U. — Use of Septuagint in New Testament, . 161 
Mow did Apostles use Septuagint ? illustration, 162 
When Septuagint correct, quoted verbatim, 163 
„ ,, incorrect, amended, . 163 
„ „ in particular sense^ para- 
phrased, . . 165 
Sect. in. — Various Eeadings, .... 164 
Inspiration and integrity of present copies not 

to be confounded, .... 164 
Objection is against present integrity ; a ques- 
tion of history, criticism, . . 166 
Modern researches, unimportant results, . 167 
Buchanan — Massoretics, . . 171 
Divine care of Old and New Testament text, 172 
Osterwald & Martin— illustration, comparison, 175 
Received text and all Greek manuscripts, 179 
„ „ GTieahdkch {Ep. to Romans), 181 
„ „ „ results examined, 187 
„ „ „ (Ep.to Oalatians), 18S 
„ „ „ (and Scholz) new 

Readings, . 190 
Limitation of dow6<— Bengelius, . . 194 

All churches have same Hebrew Old Testa- 
ment, Greek New Testament, . . 196 
SKiTT. rV.— Errors of reasoning or doctrine, . . 197 
(Supposed)reasoning8, quotations, superstitions, 
prejudices, ko., St Jerome. . , 198 



XX ANALYSIS. 



Page 
Reply (1.) Protest, . . .198 

(2.) Inconsistency — involve aban- 
donment of principles, . 200 
(3.) Where stop? _ . .200 

(4. ) Human vanity, ignorance, 204 

Sect. T. — Errorsinnarratives— contradictions in facts, 207 

(_ Supposed) dates, allusions, &c., . 207 

(1.) Scriptures always adversaries and de- 
fenders, . . . .208 
(2.) Ease of general assertion, . . 209 
Peecipitate judgment : various causes, . 211 
(«) Brevity (See Scripture Index — our 

Lord^s resurrection, &c.), . . 211 

(^) Two date- commencements (See Scripture 

Index), . . . .229 

(y) Different designs in gospels (do.), . 229 

(S) Mistranslations, contrary meanings (6.0.) , 230 

(i) Repeated acts, discourses (do.), . 234 

(2) Disregard of various readings (do.), 236 

(♦i) Point of narration not discerned (do.), 237 

lO) Want of care in chronology (do.), . 242 

Sect. VL— Errors in ISTatural Philosophy, . . 244 

Joshua X. 12 — illustration, . . . 245 

Popular language of Scripture — illustrations, 

Herschel, Airey, &c., , . . 250 

Two GRAND FACTS— G^oi says true; Lnows 

more than directly teUs us, . . 251 

First fact : iVo physical error in the Word 

ofGvd, . . .253 

Ancient and modem false the- 
ologies, &c., . . 253 
Scriptures no blunders, absur- 
dities : various, and true ; 
poetical, and true, . 257 
Second pact : Intinialions escape of science of 

the Almighty, . . 261 

Profound science of Scripture as 
to the earth, . . 261 

tbe heavens, . . 262 

light, . . . 2(»3 

plants, . . . 2ti3 

air, ... 264 

mountains, primary — se- 
condary, . . 264 
races of men, . . l:6t 
seas, . . . 2()5 
submarine fires, . • 266 
subterranean waters, • 2(')7 
languages of men, . 267 
stars, . , . 2l>8 
heaven. . • • 269 



ANALYSIS. 



Page 

Ood turns objections into testimonies — difficuU 

lies into proofs .... 270 

Sect. VII.— Declarations of St Paul, . . . 271 

1 Cor. vii. 10, 12, 25, &c. &c. (See Scripture 

Index), 271 

CHAPTER V. 

EVASIONS EXAMINED. 

Sect. I.— Does Inspiration pertain to thoughts onli/, or to 

WOKDS also ? . . . . .275 

Some confine to thoughts only, . . 275 

Keply (1.) Contrary to testimony — a Scrip- 
ture of letters and words, . 276 
(2.) Irrational also— language, the 

mirror of the soul, . . 276 

{^.) Leads further — ''errors (more) 

in ideas (than) in words," . 278 
(4, 5.) Gratuitous hypothesis : useless, 278 
(<d.) Extreme inconsistency, . 279 

(7.) Question relates to book, not to 
writers : latter sometimes, for- 
mer always, Inspired — unwill- 
ing prophets, . 281 
Sect. II. — The historical books, should they be excepted 

from Inspiration ? . . . . 286 

Some think ^AaV inspiration unnecessary, hut 
Eeply (1.) To them Old Testament Prophets 
and New Testament Apostles give 
striking, most respectful testi- 
monies, . . . 287 
(2.) Our Lord's manner of quotation, 288 
(3.) They reveal the character of God, 288 
(4.) „ „ deepthingsof man, 288 
(5.) ., „ angelic nature and 

office, . 289 

(6.) Are full of the future, . 292 

(7.) Their dramatic power and inde- 
finable cliarm, . . . 293 
(8) Divine brevity — reserve, . 296 
{'J) Divine prudence, foresight, wisdom, 300 
Sect. m. — Details [insignificant], do they deserve exception ? 306 
St Paul.— (See Scripture Index), . . 306 
Important insight, lessons, inferences, 309, 315, 321 

CHAPTER VI. 

BAOBED CBITICISM, ITS RELATION TO DIVINE INSPIRATION. 

(A science noble in its object, services, history, 
immense results ; yet necessary three, warn- 
ings)^ 323 



ANALYSIS. 



Page 
Sect. I, — Criticism a scientific inquirer, not a judge — else 

faith undermined and overthrown, . 324 
Sect. IL — Criticism an Jdstwian, not a soothsayer— ehe en- 
courages (really dismisses) impertinent and 

idle questions, .... 332 

Sect. III. — Criticism the doorkeeper, not the God, of the temple, 336 

Advice— ilinstTation, a Roman traveller, 336 
Counsel {the argument), study the Bible by 

and for itself, .... 339 

The Bible its own witness, . . 340 
„ its majesty, beauty— above all 

Divine action in smallest parts, 341 

Q.) Testimony of ministers, . 342 

(2.) Interpreters, . . . 343 

(3 ) Believers — Luther — Augustine, 343 

Take AND Read, . . . .348 

CHAPTER VIL 

CONCLUSION. 

Sect. L— 1. Retrospect, ..... 349 
Inspiration not a system, but fact : the book is 
Inspired : we have to do with its words, not 
writers, ..... 349 
Scripture entirely the word of man and God : 
human individuality : not gradual inter- 
mittent Inspiration, but "everywhere and 
entirely" from God : this established by 
Scripture, ..... 350 
Scripture declares all prophetic words given 
by God : all Old, all New Testament pro- 
phetic, warranted by God : — Examjjles of 
the apostles and of the Lord Jesus Christ, 351 
Objections considered : translations, readings, 
Septuagint in New Testament, philosophical 
errors, words of St Paul, . . . 352 
Other objections : verbal Inspiration con- 
tested, historical writings excluded, insig- 
nificant details, &c., . . . 354 
Sect. II. — 2. Religious: Bible above every thing (CHRISTIAN) , 355 
Something above Bible, namely, . . 356 
(«) Judaism, .... 356 
(j8) Romanist, . . , , 356 
(y) Impure Protestantism, • . 357 
(i) Mysticism, .... 358 
Light and growing i-adiance of Scriptures, . 359 
Grace and glory, .... 363 
•* The whole written Word is inspired by 
Qod» 306 



PEEFATOET OBSEEVATIONS. 



A GLANCE at this book and its title may have prepos- 
sessed certain minds against it, by creating two equally 
erroneous impressions. These I would fain dissipate. 

The Greek title " Theopneustia," although borrowed 
from St Paul, and although it has long been used in 
Germany, from not having found its way into our lan- 
guage, may, no doubt, have led more than one reader 
to say to himself of the subject here treated, that it is 
too learned and abstruse (scientijique) to be popular, 
and too little popular to be important. 

Yet I am bold to declare, that if any thing has given 
me at once the desire and the courage to undertake it, 
it is just the double conviction I entertain of its impor- 
tance and its simplicity. 

And, first of all, I do not think that, after we have 
come to know that Christianity is divine, there can be 
presented to our mind any question bearing more essen- 
tially on the vitality of our faith than this : " Does the 
Bible come from God ? is it altogether from God ? 
or may it not be true, as some have maintained, that 
there occur in it maxims purely human, statements 
not exactly true, exhibitions of vulgar ignorance and 
ill -sustained reasoning ? in a Avord, books, or portions 



6 PREFATORY OBSERVATIONS. 

of books, foreign to the interests of the faith, subject to 
the natural weakness of the writer's judgment, and 
alloyed with error?" Here we have a question that 
admits of no compromise, a fundamental question — a 
question of life ! It is the first that confronts you on 
opening the Scriptures, and with it your religion ought 
to commence. 

Were it the case, as you whom I now address will 
have it, that all in the Bible is not important, does 
not bear upon the faith, and does not relate to Jesus 
Christ ; and were it the case, taking another view, that 
in that book there is nothing inspired except what, in 
your opinion, is important, does bear upon the faith, 
and does relate to Jesus Christ; then your Bible is 
quite a different book from that of the Fathers, of the 
Reformers, and of the Saints of all ages. It is fallible; 
theirs was perfect. It has chapters or parts of chap- 
ters, it has sentences and expressions, to be excluded 
from the number of the sentences and expressions that 
are God's; theirs was "all given by inspiration of 
God," " all profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for cor- 
rection, for instruction in righteousness, and for render- 
ing the man of God perfect by faith in Christ Jesus." 
In that case, one and the same passage is, in your judg- 
ment, as remote from what it was in theirs as Ciirth is 
from heaven. 

You may have opened the Bible, for example, at the 
45th Psalm, or at the Song of Songs ; and while you 
will see nothing there but what is most human in the 
things of the earth — a long epithalaniium, or the love 
communings of a daughter of Sharon and her young 
bridegroom — they read there of the glories of the Church, 



PLENARY AND PARTIAL INSPIRATION. 7 

the endearments of God's love, the deep things of Jesus 
Christ — in a word, all that is most divine in the things 
of heaven ; and if they found themselves unable to 
read of those things there, they knew at least that they 
were there, and there they tried to find them. 

Suppose now that we both take up one of St Paul's 
epistles. While one of us will attribute such or such 
a sentence, the meaning of which he fails to seize, or 
which shocks his carnal sense, to the writer's Jewish 
prejudices, to the most common intentions, to circum- 
stances altogether human ; the other will set himself, 
with profound respect, to scan the thoughts of the 
Holy Ghost : he will believe these perfect even before 
he has caught their meaning, and will put any apparent 
insignificance or obscurity to the account of his own 
dulness or ignorance alone. 

Thus, while in the Bible of the one all has its object, 
its place, its beauty, and its use, as in a tree, branches 
and leaves, vessels and fibres, epidermis and bark even, 
have all theirs ; the Bible of the other is a tree of 
which some of the leaves and branches, some of the 
fibres and the bark, have not been made by God. 

But there is much more than this in the difference 
between us ; for not only, according to yoiy reply, we 
shall have two Bibles, but no one can know what your 
Bible really is. 

It is human and fallible, say you, only in a certain 
measure ; but who shall define that measure ? If it be 
true that man, in putting his baneful impress upon it, 
have left the stains of humanity there, who shall deter- 
mine the depth of that impression, and the number of 
those stains ? You have told me that it has its human 
3 



PREFATORY OBSERVATIONS. 



part; butwliat are the limits of that part, and who is to 
fix them for me ? Why, no one. These every one 
must determine for himself, at the bidding of his own 
judgment; in other words, this fallible portion of the 
Scriptures will be enlarged in the inverse ratio of our 
being illuminated by God's light, and a man will de- 
prive himself of communications from above in the very 
proportion that he has need of them ; in like manner 
as we see idolaters make to themselves divinities that 
are more or less impure, in proportion as they them- 
selves are more or less alienated from the living and 
holy God ! Thus, then, every one will curtail the in- 
spired Scriptures in different proportions, and making 
for himself an infallible rule of that Bible, so corrected 
by himself, will say to it: " Guide thou me henceforth, 
for thou art my rule ! " like those makers of graven 
images of whom Isaiah speaks, who make to them- 
selves a god, and say to it, " Deliver me, lor thou art 
my god." — (Isa. xliv. 17.) 

But this is not all ; Avhat follows is of graver import 
still. According to your reply, it is not the Bible only 
that is changed, — it is you. 

Yes, even in presence of the passages which you have 
most admired you will have neither the attitude nor 
the heart of a believer ! How can that be, after you have 
summoned these along with the rest of the Scriptures 
before the tribunal of your judgment, there to be pro- 
nounced by you divine, or not divine, or semi-divine? 
What authority for your soul can there be in an utterance 
which for you is infallible only in virtue of yourself? 
Had it not to present itself at your bar, along with 
other suyings of the same book, which you have pro- 



PARTIAL INSPIRATION DKSTRDCTIVE OF FAITH. 9 

nounced to be wholly or partly human ? Will your 
mmd, in that case, put itself into the humble and sub- 
missive posture of a disciple, after having held the place 
of a judge? This is impossible. The deference you 
will show to it will be that perhaps of acquiescence, 
never that of faith ; of approval, never of adoration. 
Do you tell me that you will believe in the divinity 
of the passage ? but then it is not in God that you 
will believe, but in yourself! This utterance pleases, 
but does not govern you; it stands before you like a 
lamp; it is not within you as an unction from above — a 
principle of light, a fountain of life! I do not believe 
there ever was a Pope, however possessed with notions 
of the importance of his own priestly office, who could 
confidently address his prayers to a dead person, whom 
he had himself, by canonizing him of his own plenary 
authority, raised to the rank of the demigods. How, 
then, shall a reader of the Bible, who has himself 
canonized a passage of the Scriptures, however possessed 
with a high idea of his ow^n wisdom, possibly have the 
disposition of a true believer with regard to such a pas - 
sage ? "Will his mind come down from his pontifical 
chair, and humble itself before this utterance of thought, 
which, but for himself, would remain human, or at least 
doubtful ? No one tries to fathom the meaning of a 
passage which he has himself legitimated, only in virtue 
of a meaning which he thinks he has already found. 
One submits only by halves to an authority which he 
has had it in his power to decline, and which he has 
once held to be doubtful. One worships but imperfectly 
what he has first degraded. 

Besides, and let this be carefully noted, inasmuch as 



10 PREFATORY OBSERVATIONS. 

the entire divinity of such or such a passage of the 
Scriptures depends, in your view, not on its being found 
in the book of God's oracles, but on its presenting cer- 
tain traits of spirituality and wisdom to your wisdom 
and your spirituality, the sentence that you pass cannot 
always be so exempt from hesitation as that you shall 
not retain, with regard to it, some of the doubts with 
which you set out. Hence your faith will necessarily 
participate in your uncertainties, and will be itself im- 
perfect, undecided, conditional. As is the sentence, so 
will be the faith ; and as is the faith, so will be the life. 
But such is not the faith, neither is such the life of 
God's elect. 

But what will better show the importance of the 
question which is about to occupy us is, that if one of 
the two systems to which it may lead have, as we have 
said, all its roots imbued with scepticism, its fruit in- 
evitably will be a new unbelief. 

How do we come to see that so many thousands can 
every morning and evening open their Bibles without 
once perceiving there doctrines which it teaches with 
the utmost clearness? How can they thus, during 
many a long year, walk on in darkness' with the sun in 
their hands ? Do they not hold these books to be a re- 
velation from God ? Yes, but prepossessed with false 
notions of the divine inspiration, and believing that there 
still exists in Scripture an alloy of human error — fain to 
find in it, nevertheless, its reasonable utterances oi 
thought, in order to their being authorized to believe 
these divine — they make it their study, as if uncon- 
sciously, to give these a meaning that their own wisdom 
approves; and thus not only do (hey render themselves 



RESULTS OF PAHTIAL INSPIRATION, 11 

incapable of recognising therein the wisdom of God, 
but they sink the Scriptures in their own respect. In 
reading St Paul's epistles, for example, they will do 
their utmost to find in them man's justification by the 
law, his native innocence and bent towards that which 
is good, the moral omnipotence of his will — the merit of 
his works. But, then, what happens ? Alas ! just that 
after having given the sacred writer such forced mean- 
ings, they find his language so ill- conceived for his 
assumed object, such ill-chosen terms for what he is 
made to say, and such ill-sustained reasonings, that, as 
if in spite of themselves, they lose any respect felt for 
the letter of the Scriptures, and plunge into rationalism. 
It is thus that, after having commenced with unbelief, 
they reap a new unbelief as the fruit of their study; 
darkness becomes the recompense of darkness, and that 
terrible saying of Christ is fulfilled, " From him that 
hath not, shall be taken away even that which he hath." 

Such, then, it is evident, is the fundamental impor- 
tance of the great question with which we are about to 
be occupied. 

According to the answer which you, to whom we now 
address ourselves, make to it, the arm of God's Word 
is palsied for you ; the sword of the Spirit has become 
blunted — it has lost its temper and its power to pierce. 
How could it henceforth penetrate your joints and mar- 
row ? How could it become stronger than your lusts, 
than your doubts, than the world, than Satan ? How 
could it give you energy, victory, light, peace? No! 
It possibly may happen, at wide intervals of time, by a 
pure effect of God's unmerited favour, that, in spite of 
this dismal state of a soul, a divine utterance may come 



12 PREFATORY OBSERVATIONS. 

and seize it at unawares; but it does not remain the less 
true, that this disposition which judges the Scriptures, 
and doubts beforehand of their universal inspiration, is 
one of the greatest obstacles that we can oppose to their 
acting with effect. " The word spoken," says St Paul 
(Heb. iv. 2), " did not profit, not being mixed with 
faith in them who heard it ;" while the most abundant 
benedictions of that same Scripture were at all times the 
lot of the souls which received it, " not as the word of 
man, but which it is truly, as the word of God, working 
effectually in them who believe." — (1 Thess. ii. 13.) 

It will thus be seen, that this question is of immense 
importance in its bearing upon the vitality of our faith; 
and we are entitled to say, that between the two an- 
swers that may be made to it, there lies the same great 
gulf that must have separated two Israelites who might 
both have seen Jesus Christ in the flesh, and both 
equally owned him as a prophet ; but one of whom, 
looking to his carpenter's dress, his poor fare, his hands 
inured to labour, and his rustic retinue, believed further, 
that he was not exempt from error and sin, as an ordi- 
nary prophet ; whilst the other recognised in him Im- 
manuel, the Lamb of God, the everlasting God, our 
Righteousness, the King of kings, the Lord of lords. 

The reader may not yet have admitted each of these 
considerations ; but he will at least admit that I have 
said enough to be entitled to conclude that it is worth 
while to study such a question, and that, in weighing it, 
you hold in your hands the most precious interests of the 
people of God. This is all I desired in a preface. It was 
the first point to which I wished to direct the reader's 
attention beforehand, and now comes the second. 



RRLIGION AND XnKOLOGY HOW RELATED. 13 

If the Study of this doctrine be the duty of all, that 
study is also within the reach, of all ; and the author 
scruples not to say, that in writing his book, the dearest 
object of his ambition has been to make it level to the 
comprehension of all classes of readers. 

Meanwhile, he thinks he hears many make this ob- 
jection. You address yourself to men of learning, they 
will say ; your book is no concern of ours : we confine 
ourselves to religion, but here you give us theology. 

Theology no doubt ! but, what theology ? Why, that 
which ought to be the study of all the heirs of eternal 
life, and with respect to which a very child may be a 
theologian. 

Religion and theology ! let us explain what we mean ; 
for often are both these terms abused to the injury of 
both, by people presuming to set the one against the 
other. Is not theology defined in all our dictionaries 
as " the science which has for its object, God and his 
revelation ? " Now, when I was a boy at school, the 
catechism of my childhood made this the designation of 
my religion. " It is the science," it told me, " that 
teaches us to know God and his Word, God and his 
counsels, God in Christ." So, then, there is no diffe- 
rence between them, in object, means, or aim. Their 
object is truth ; their means, the Word of God ; their 
aim, holiness. " Sanctify them, O Father, by thy truth : 
thy Word is truth ! " Such is the aim contemplated by 
both, as it was that of their dying Master. How, then, 
shall we distinguish the one from the other ? By this 
alone — that theology is religion studied more methodi- 
cally, and with the aid of more perfect instruments. 

Men have contrived, no doubt, to make, under the 



14 PREFATORY OBSERVATIONS. 

name of theology, a confused compound of philosophy, 
or the traditions of men with God's word ; but that was 
not theology — it was only scholastic philosophy. 

It is true that the term Religion is not always era- 
ployed in its objective sense, to signify the science that 
embraces the truths of our faith ; but it is used also, 
with a subjective meaning, to designate rather the sen- 
timents which those truths foster in the hearts of be- 
lievers. Let these two meanings be kept distinct. This 
is what we may do, and ought to do ; but to oppose the 
one to the other, by calling the one Religion, the other 
Theology, were a deplorable absurdity. This would be 
to maintain, in other terms, that one might have the 
religious sentiments without the religious doctrines from 
which alone they spring ; this would imply that you 
would have a man to be moral without having any 
religious tenets, pious without belief, a Christian with- 
out Christ, an effect without a cause — living without a 
soul ! Deplorable illusion ! " Holy Father, this is 
life eternal, that they might know thee the only true 
God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." 

But even were it rather in its objective sense that 
people set themselves to oppose religion to theology — 
that is to say, the religion a Christian learns in his 
native tongue in his Bible, to the religion which a 
more accomplished person would study in the same 
Bible with the aid of history and of the learneil lan- 
guages — still I Avould say, even in this case, Distinguish 
between the two ; don't oppose them to each other ! Ought 
not every true Christian to be a theologian ns far as he 
can? Is he not enjoined to be learned in the Word of 
God, nurtured in sound doctrine, rooted and cstalilished 



RELIGION AND THEOLOGY — HOW RELATED. 15 

in the knowledge of Jesus Christ ? And was it not to 
the multitude that our Lord said, in the midst of the 
street, " Search the Scriptures." 

Religion, then, in its objective meanino;, bears the 
same relation to theology that the globe does to astro- 
nomy. They are distinct, and yet united ; and theology 
renders the same services to religion that the astro- 
nomy of the geometricians offers to that of seamen. A 
ship captain might, no doubt, do without the Meca- 
nique Celeste in finding his way to the seas of China, or 
in returning from the Antipodes ; but even then it is 
to that science that, while traversing the ocean with his 
elementary notions, he will owe the advantage he de- 
rives from his formulas, the accuracy of his tables, and 
the precision of the methods which give him his longi- 
tudes, and set his mind at ease as to the course he is 
pursuing. Thus too, the Christian, in order to his tra- 
versing the ocean of this world, and to his reaching the 
haven to which God calls him, may dispense with the 
ancient languages and the lofty speculations of theo- 
logy ; but, after all, the notions of religion with which 
he cannot dispense, will receive, in a great measure, 
their precision and their certainty from theological 
science. And while he steers towards eternal life with 
his eyes fixed on the compass which God has given him, 
still it is to theology that he will owe the certainty that 
that heavenly magnet is the same that it was in the 
days of the apostles — that the instrument of salvation 
has been placed intact in his hands, that its indications 
are faithful, and that the needle never varies. 

There was a time when all the sciences were myste- 
rious, professing secresy, having their initiated persons, 



16 PREFATORY OBSERVATIONS. 

their sacred language, and their freemasonry. Physi- 
cal science, geometry, medicine, grammar, history — every 
thing was treated of in Latin. Men soared aloft in the 
clouds, far above the vulgar crowd ; and would droij 
now and then from their bark sublime a few detached 
leaves, which we were bound to take up respectfully, 
and were not allowed to criticise. Now-a-days, all is 
changed. Genius glories in making itself intelligible 
to the mass of mankind ; and after having mounted up 
to the ethereal regions of science, there to pounce upon 
truth in her highest retreats, it endeavours to find a 
method of coming down again, and approaching near 
enough to let us know the paths it has pursued, and 
the secrets it has discovered. But if such be at present 
the almost universal tendency of the secular sciences, it 
has been at all times the distinctive character of true 
theology. That science is at the service of all. The 
others may do without the people, as the people may do 
without them ; true theology, on the contrary, has need 
of flocks, as they again have need of it. It preserves 
their religion ; and their religion preserves it in turn. 
Woe to them when their theology languishes, and does 
not speak to them ! Woe to them when the religion of 
the flocks leave it to go alone, and no longer esteems 
it ! We ought then, both for its sake and for theirs, 
to hold that it should speak to them, listen to them, 
study in their sight, and keep its schools open to them 
as our churches are. 

When theology occupies the professor's chair in the 
midst of Christian flocks, its relations with them, con- 
stantly keeping before its eyes the realities of the 
Christian life, constantly recall to it also the realities of 



RELIGION AND THEOLOGY THEIR USES. 17 

science : man's misery, the counsels of the Father, the 
Redeemer's cross, the consolations of the Holy Ghost, 
holiness, eternity. Then, too, the Church's conscience, 
repressing its wanderings, overawes its hardihood, com- 
pels it to be serious, and corrects the effects of that fa- 
miliarity, so readily running into profaneness, with 
which the science of the schools puts forth its hand 
and touches holy things. In speaking to it, day after 
day, of that life which the preaching of the doctrines of 
the Cross nourishes in the Church (a life, without the 
knowledge of which all its learning would he as in- 
complete as the natural history of man were it de- 
rived from the study of dead bodies), the religion of the 
flocks disengages theology from its excessive readiness 
to admire those branches of knowledge which do not 
sanctify. It often repeats to it the question addressed 
by St Paul to the perverted science of the Galatians : 
" Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by 
the hearing of faith ? " It disabuses it of the wisdom 
of man ; it imbues it with reverence for the Word of 
God, and (in that holy Word) for those doctrines of 
the righteousness of faith which are " the power of 
God our Saviour," and Avhich ought to penetrate the 
whole soul of its science. Thus does it teach it practi- 
cally how to associate, in its researches, the work of 
the conscience with that of the understanding, and 
never to seek after God's truth but under the com- 
bined lights of study and prayer. 

And, on the other hand, theology renders in its 
turn, to Christian flocks, services with which they can- 
not long dispense without damage. It is it that watches 
over the religion of a people, to see that the lips of the 



18 PREFATORY OBSERVATIONS. 

priest keep knowledge, and that the law may be had 
from his mouth. It is it that preserves purity of doc- 
trine in the holy ministry of the gospel, and the just 
balancing of all truths in preaching. It is it that as- 
sures the simple against the confident assertions of a 
science inaccessible to them. It is it that goes for its 
answers to the same quarters whence those assertions 
have come ; which puts its finger on the sophisms of 
the adversaries of truth, overawes them by its presence, 
and compels them, before the flocks, to avoid exaggera- 
tion, and to put some reserve on the terms they employ. 
It is it that gives the alarm at the first and so often 
decisive moment, when the language of religion among 
a people begins to decline from the truth, and when 
error, like a rising weed, sprouts and grows into a plant. 
It then gives timely warning, and people hasten to root 
it out. 

It has ever happened that when flocks have been 
pious, theology has thriven. She has accomplished her- 
self with learning ; she has put due honour on studies 
that require vigorous efibrt ; and, the better to capaci- 
tate herself for searching the Scriptures, not only has 
she desired to master all the sciences that can throw 
light upon them, but she has infused life into all other 
sciences, whether by the example of her own labours, 
or by gathering around her men of lofty minds, or by 
infusing into academical institutions a generous senti- 
ment of high morality, which has promotc>l all their de- 
velopments. 

Thus it is that, in giving a higher character to all 
branches of study, she has often ennobled that of a 
whole people. 



DEGRADING RELIGION, YOU DEGRADE ALL. 19 

But, on the contrary, when theology and the people 
have become indifferent to each other, and drowsy flocks 
have lived only for this world, then theology herself 
has given evident proofs of sloth, frivolity, ignorance, 
or perhaps of a love of novelties; seeking a profane po- 
pularity at any cost; affecting to have made discoveries 
that are only whispered to the ear, that are taught in 
academies, and never mentioned in the churches; keep- 
ing her gates shut amid the people, and at the same 
time throwing out to them from the windows doubts 
and impieties, with the view of ascertaining the present 
measure of their indifference; until at last she breaks 
out into open scandal, in attacking doctrines, or in de- 
nying the integrity or the inspiration of certain books, 
or in giving audacious denials to the facts which they 
relate. 

And let a man beware of believing that the whole 
people do not erelong feel the consequences of so enor- 
mous a mischief. They will suffer from it even in their 
temporal interests, and their national existence will be 
compromised. In degrading their religion, you propor- 
tionally lower their moral character; you leave them 
without a soul. All things take their measure, in a 
nation, according to the elevation that is given to heaven 
among the people. If their heaven be low, every thing 
is affected by it even on the earth. All there becomes 
erelong more confined and more creeping ; the future 
becomes narrowed; patriotism becomes, materialized; 
generous traditions drop out of notice; the moral sense 
loses its tone; material wellbeing engrosses all regard; 
and all conservative principles, one after another, dis- 
apj/can 

4 



20 PREFATORY OBSERVATIONS. 

We conclude then, on the one hand, that there exists 
the most intimate union, not only between a people's 
welfare and their religion, but between their religion 
and true theology; and, on the other hand, that if there 
have always been most pertinent reasons for this science 
being taught as such, for all and before all, never was 
this character more necessary for it than when treating 
of the doctrine which is about to occupv us- It is the 
doctrine of doctrines ; the doctrine that teaches us all 
others, and in virtue of which alone they are doctrines; 
the doctrine which is to the believer's soul what the air 
is to his lungs — necessary for birth in the Christian life 
— necessary for living in it — necessary for advancing in 
it to maturity, and persevering in it. 

Such, then, has been the twofold view under which 
this work has been composed. 

Every part of it, I trust, will bear testimony to my 
serious desire to make it useful to Christians of all 



With this object I have thrown oif the forms of the 
school. Without entirely relinquishing, I have ab- 
stained from multiplying, quotations in the ancient 
tongues. In pressing the wonderful unanimity of Chris- 
tian antiquity on this question, I have confined myself 
to general facts. In lino, when I have h;)d to treat 
the various questions that bear upon this subject, and 
which must be introduced in order to complete the 
doctrine which it involves, I have thrown them all into 
a separate chapter. And even there, against tlie advice 
of some friends, I have employed a method considered 
by them out of harmony with the general tone of the 
book, but which to me has seemed fitted to enable the 



GRAND OBJECT OF THIS WORK 21 

reader to take a clearer and more rapid vie^Y of the sub- 
ject. 

It is, then, under this simple and practical form that, 
in presenting this work to the Church of God, I rejoice 
that I can recommend it to the blessing of Him who 
preached in the streets, and who, to John the Baptist, 
pointed to this as the peculiar character of his mission : 
" To the poor the gospel is preached." 

Well will it be if these pages confirm in the simpli- 
city and the blissfulness of their faith those Christians 
who, without learning, have already believed, through 
the Scriptures, in the full inspiration of the Scriptures ! 
Well will it be if some weary and heavy-laden souls are 
brought to listen more closely to that God who speaks 
to them in every line of his holy book! Well will it 
be if, through any thing said by us, some travellers Zion - 
ward (like Jacob on his pilgrimage at the stone of 
Bethel), after having reposed their wearied being with 
too much indifference on this book of God, should come 
to behold at last that mysterious ladder which rises 
from thence to heaven, and by which alone the messages 
of grace can come down to their souls, and their prayers 
mount up to God ! Would that I could induce them, 
in their turn, to pour the sacred unction of their grati- 
tude and their joy, and that they also could exclaim : 
" Surely the Lord is in this place ! this is the house of 
God, and the gate of heaven!" 

For myself, I fear not to say, that in devoting my- 
self to the labour this work has cost me, I have often 
had to thank God for having called me to it ; for while 
engaged in it, I have more than once beheld the divine 
majesty fill with its brightness the whole temple of the 



PREFATORY OBSERVATIONS. 



Scriptures. Here have I seen all the tissues, coarse in 
appearance, that form the vesture of the Son of man, 
become white, as no fuller on earth could whiten them; 
here have I often seen the Book illuminated with the 
glory of God, and all its words seem radiant ; in a word, 
I have felt what one ever experiences when maintain- 
ing a holy and true cause, namely, that it gains in truth 
and in majesty the more we contemplate it. 

my God, give me to love this Word of thine, and 
to possess it, as much as thou has taught me to ad- 
mire it! 

" All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man is as 
the flower of the grass : the grass withereth, the flower 
thereof fadeth, but the word of God abideth for ever ; 
and it is this word which, by the gospel, has been 
preached unto us." 



THEOPNEUSTIA; 



PLENARY INSPIEATION OF THE HOLY SCRIPTUEES. 



Our object in this book is, with God's help, and on 
the sole authority of his "Word, to set forth, establish, 
and defend, the Christian doctrine of Divine Inspiration. 



CHAPTER I. 

DEFINITION OP THEOPNEUSTIA. 

SECTION I. 

This term is used for the mysterious power which the 
Divine Spirit put forth on the authors of the scriptures 
of the Old and New Testament, in order to their com- 
posing these as they have been received by the Church 
of God at their hands. " All Scripture," says an 
apostle, ^^ is theopneustic."^ 

» 2 Tim, iii. 16. (Theopneust, less euphonious, would be more 
exact.) 



24 MEANING OF THEOPNEUSTIA. 

This Greek expression, at the time when St Paul 
employed it, was new perhaps even among the Greeks; 
yet though the term was not used among the idolatrous 
Greeks, such was not the case among the Hellenistic 
Jews. The historian Josephus,-^ a contemporary of St 
Paul's, employs another closely resembling it in his 
first book against Apion, when, in speaking of all the 
prophets who composed, says he, the twenty- two sacred 
books of the Old Testament,^ he adds, that they wrote 
according to the pneustia (or the inspiration) that conies 
from God? And the Jewish philosopher Philo,* him- 
self a contemporary of Josephus, in the account he has 
left us of his embassy to the emperor Caius, making 
use, in his turn, of an expression closely resembling 
that of St Paul, calls the Scriptures '-'• theochrest oracles;"'^ 
that is to say, oracles given under the agency and dic- 
tation of God. 

Theopneustia is not a system, it is a fact ; and this 
fact, like every thing else that has taken place in the 
history of redemption, is one of the doctrines of our 
faith. 



SECTION II. 

Meanwhile it is of consequence for us to say, and it is 
of consequence that it be understood, that this miracu- 
lous operation of the Holy Ghost had not the sacred 
writers themselves for its object — for these were only his 
instruments, and were soon to pass away; but that its 
objects were the holy books themselves, which were des- 
tined to reveal from aije to age, to the Church, the coun- 
sels of God, and which were never to pass away. 

The power then put forth on th)se men of God, and 
of which they themselves were sensible only in very 

1 P. 1036, edit. Anrel. Allob. 1611. 

* See on this nutnber our chap. iii. sect. 2, qucs. 27. 

^ Kara tv.k iTiVvo/ac tt.v «to Teu 9i«u. * P. 10J2, edit. Froncof. 



INSPIRATION ASSr.RTF.D NOT i:XPLAINED. 25 

different degrees, has not been precisely defined to us. 
Nothing authorizes us to explain it. Scripture has 
never presented either its manner or its measure as an 
object of study. What it offers to our faith is solely 
the inspiration of Avhat they say— the divinity of the 
book they have written. In this respect it recognises 
no difference among them. "What they say, they tell 
us, is th( opneustic : their book is from God. Whether 
they recite the mysteries of a past more ancient than 
the creation, or those of a future more remote than the 
coming again of the Son of man, or the eternal coun- 
sels of the Most High, or the secrets of man's heart, 
or the deep things of God — whether they describe 
their own emotions, or relate what they remember, or 
repeat contemporary narratives, or copy over genea- 
logies, or make extracts from uninspired documents — 
their writing is inspired, their narratives are directed 
from above ; it is always God who speaks, who relates, 
who ordains or reveals by their mouth, and who, in 
order to this, employs their personality in different 
measures : for " the Spirit of God has been upon them," 
it is written, " and his word has been upon their 
tongue." And though it be always the word of man, 
since they are always men who utter it, it is always, too, 
the word of God, seeing that it is God who superin- 
tends, employs, and guides them. They give their 
narratives, their doctrines, or their commandments, 
" not with the words of man's wisdom, but with the 
words taught by the Holy Ghost ;" and thus it is that 
God himself has not onlv put his seal to all these facts, 
and constituted himself the author of all these com- 
mands, and the revealer of all these truths, but that, 
further, he has caused them to be given to his Church 
in the order, and in the measure, and in the terms 
which he has deemed most suitable to his heavenly 
purpose. 

Were we asked, then, how this work of divine in- 
spiration has been accomplished in the men of God, 
we should reply, that we do not know; that it does 



26 OPINIONS OF SCHLETERMACIIER, DE WETTE, ETC. 

not behoye us to know ; and that it is in the same 
ignorance, and with a faith quite of the same kind, 
that we receive the doctrine of the new birth and sanc- 
tification of a soul by the Holy Ghost. We believe 
that the Spirit enlightens that soul, cleanses it, raises 
it, comforts it, softens it. We perceive all these effects ; 
we admire and we adore the cause ; but we have found 
it our duty to be content never to know the means by 
which this is done. Be it the same, then, with regard 
to divine inspiration. 

And were we, further, called to say at least what 
the men of God experienced in their bodily organs, in 
their will, or in their understandings, while engaged in 
tracing the pages of the sacred book, we should reply, 
that the powers of inspiration were not felt by all to 
the same degree, and that their experiences were not 
at all uniform ; but we might add, that the knowledge 
of such a fact bears very little on the interests of our 
faith, seeing that, as respects that faith, we have to do 
with the book, and not with the man. It is the book 
that is inspired, and altogether inspired : to be assured 
of this ought to satisfy us. 



SECTION III. 

Three descriptions of men, in these late times, without 
disavowing the divinity of Christianity, and without ven- 
turing to decline the authority of the Scriptures, have 
thought themselves authorized to reject this doctrine. 

Some of these have disowned the very existence of 
this action of the Holy Ghost ; others have denied its 
wniversality ; others, again, its p/cfiltxde. 

The first, like Dr Schleiermacher,' Dr De Wctte, and 
many other German divines, reject all miraculous in- 
spiration, and are unwilling to attribute to the sacred 
writers any more than Cicero accorded to the poets — 

> Schleiermacber, der Christliche Glnube, band i. s. 115. 



OF MICIIAELIS, TWESTEN, PYE SMITH, ETC. 2? 

afflatum spiritus divini — " a divine action of nature, 
an interior power resembling the other vital forces of 
nature."^ 

The second, like Dr Michaelis,^ and like Theodore of 
Mopsuestia,^ -while admitting the existence of a divine 
inspiration, would confine it to a part only of the sacred 
books : to the first and fourth of the four evangelists, 
for example ; to a part of the epistles, to a part of 
Moses, a part of Isaiah, a part of Daniel. These por- 
tions of the Scriptures, say they, are from God, the 
others are from man. 

The third class, in fine, like M. Twesten in Ger- 
many, and like many divines in England,* extend, it 
is true, the notion of a divine inspiration to all parts of 
the Bible, but not to all equally {nicht gleichmaessig^. 
Inspiration, as they understand it, might be universal 
indeed, but unequal ; often imperfect, accompanied 
with innocent errors ; and carried to very different 
degrees, according to the nature of different passages : 
of which degrees they constitute themselves, more or 
less, the judges. 

Many of these, particularly in England, have gone 
so far as to distinguish four degrees of divine inspira- 
tion : the inspiration of superintendence, they have said, 
in virtue of which the sacred writers have been con- 
stantly preserved from serious error in all that relates 
to faith and life ; the inspiration of elevation^ by which 
the Holy Ghost, further, by carrying up the thoughts 
of the men of God into the purest regions of truth, 
must have indirectly stamped the same characters of 
holiness and grandeur on their words ; the inspiration 
of direction^ under the more powerful action of which 
the sacred writers were under God's guidance in regard 
to what they said and abstained from saying ; finally, 

1 De Wette, Lehrbuch Anmerk. Twesten, Vorlesungen liber die 
Dojnnatik, tome i. p. 424, &c. 

2 Michaelis, Introd. to the New Testament. 

3 See our chap. v. sect. 2, quest. 44. 

4 Drs Pye Smith, Dick, Wilson. 



WHAT IT CONCERNS US TO KNOW. 



the inspiration of suggestion. Here, they say, all the 
thoughts, and even the words, have been given by God, 
by means of a still more energetic and direct operation 
of his Spirit. 

" The Theopneustia," says M. Twesten, " extends un- 
questionably even to words, but only when the choice 
or the employment of them is connected with the reli- 
gious life of the soul ; for one ought, in this respect," 
he adds, " to distinguish between the Old and New 
Testament, between the Law and the Gospel, between 
history and prophecy, between narratives and doctrines, 
between the apostles and their apostolical assistants." 

To our mind these are all fantastic distinctions ; the 
Bible has not authorized them ; the Church of the first 
eight centuries of the Christian era knew nothing of 
them ; and we believe them to be erroneous in them- 
selves, and deplorable in their results. 

Our design then, in this book, in opposition to these 
three systems, is to prove the existence, the univer- 
sality, and the plenitude of the divine inspiration of the 
Bible. 

First of all, it concerns us to know if there has been 
a divine and miraculous inspiration for the Scriptures. 
We say that there has. Next, we have to know if the 
parts of Scripture that are divinely inspired are equally 
and entirely so ; or, in other terms, if God have pro- 
vided, in a certain though mysterious manner, that the 
very words of his holy book should always be what 
they ought to be, and that it should contain no error. 
This, too, we affirm to be the case. Finally, we have 
to know whether what is thus inspired by God in the 
Scriptures, be a part of the Scriptures, or the whole of 
the Scriptures. We say that it is the whole Scriptures; — 
the historical books as well as the prophecies; the Gos- 
pels as well as the Song of Solomon; the Gospels of 
Mark and Luke, as well as those of John and JNIatthew; 
the history of the shipwreck of St Paul in the waters 
of the Adriatic, as well as that of the shipwreck of the 
old world in the waters of the flood ; the scenes of 



PASCAL AND NEAVTOX. 29 

Mamre beneath the tents of Abraham, as well as those 
of the day of Christ in the eternal tabernacles ; the 
prophetic prayers in which the Messiah, a thousand 
years before his first advent, cries in the Psalms, " My 
God, my God, Avhy hast thou forsaken me ? — they have 
pierced my hands and my feet— they have cast lots 
upon ray vesture — they look and stare at me" — as well 
as the narratives of them by St John, St Mark, St 
Luke, or St Matthew. 

In other words, it has been our object to establish 
by the Word of God that the Scripture is from God, 
that the Scripture is throughout from God, and that the 
Scripture throughout is entirely from God. 

Meanwhile, however, we must make ourselves clearly 
understood. In maintaining that all Scripture is from 
God, we are very for from thinking that man goes for 
nothing in it. We shall return in a subsequent section 
to this opinion ; but we have felt it necessary to state 
it here. There, all the words are man's ; as there, too, 
all the words are God's. In a certain sense, the Epistle 
to the Romans is altogether a letter of Paul's ; and in 
a still higher sense, the Epistle to the Romans is alto- 
gether a letter of God's. 

Pascal might have dictated one of his Provincial Let- 
ters to some Clermont artisan, and another to the Ab- 
bess of Port- Royal. Could the former have been on 
that account less Pascalian than all the rest ? Un- 
doubtedly not. The great Newton, when he wished 
to hand over to the world his marvellous discoveries, 
might have employed some Cambridge youth to write 
out the fortieth, and some college servant the forty-first 
proposition ofhis immortal work, the Prwcipur, while 
he might have dictated the remaining pages to Barrow 
and Halley. Should we any the less possess the disco- 
veries of his genius, and the mathematical reasonings 
which lead us to refer to one and the same law all the 
movements in the universe ? Would the whole work be 
any the less his ? No. undoubtedly. Perhaps, how- 
ever, some one at his leisure might have furtlier taken 



30 WE HAVE TO DO WITH THE BOOK iNOT THE MEN. 

some interest in knowing what were the emotions of 
those two great men, or the simple thoughts of that 
boy, or the honest musings of that domestic, at the time 
that their four pens, all alike docile, traced the Latin 
sentences that were dictated to them. You may have 
been told that the two latter, as they plied the quill, 
allowed their thoughts to revert indifferently to past 
scenes in the gardens of the city, or in the courts of 
Trinity College ; while the two professors, following 
with the most intense interest every thought of their 
friend, and participating in his sublime career, like 
eaglets on their mother's back, sprang with him into the 
loftiest elevations of science, borne up by his mighty 
wings, soaring with delight into the new and bound- 
less regions which he had opened to them. Neverthe- 
less, you may have been told, among the lines thus dic- 
tated, there may have been some which neither the boy 
nor even the professors were capable of understanding. 
These details are of little consequence, you would have 
replied ; I will not waste any time upon them ; I will 
study the book. Its preface, its title, it first line, and 
its last line, all its theorems, easy or difficult, under- 
stood or not understood, are from the same author, and 
that is enough. Whoever the writers may have been, 
and however different the respective elevation of their 
thoughts, their hand, faithful to its task, and superin- 
tended while engaged in it, has equally traced their 
master's thoughts on the same roll of paper ; and there 
I can always study, with equal confidence, in the very 
words of his genius, the mathematical principles of 
Newton's philosophy. 

Such is the fact of the divine inspiration of the Scrip- 
tures; nearly to this extent, that in causing his books to 
be written by inspired men, the Holy Ghost has almost 
always, more or less, employed the instrumentality of 
their understanding, their will, their memory, and all 
the powers of their personality, as we shall erelong have 
occasion to repeat. And it is thus that God, who de- 
sired to make known to his elect, in a book that was to 



MANS PART IN GOD S BOOK. 31 

last for ever, the spiritual principles of divine philoso- 
phy, has caused its pages to be written, in the course of 
a period of sixteen hundred years, by priests, by kings, 
by warriors, by shepherds, by publicans, by fishermen, 
by scribes, by tentmakers, associating their affections 
and their faculties therewith, more or less, according as 
he deemed fit. Such, then, is God's book. Its first 
line, its last line, all its teachings, understood or not 
understood, are by the same author; and that ought to 
suffice for us. Whoever may have been the writers — 
whatever their circumstances, their impressions, their 
comprehension of the book, and the measure of their 
individuality in this powerful and mysterious operation — 
they have all written faithfully and under superintend- 
ence in the same roll, under the guidance of one and 
the same i\Iaster, for whom a thousand years are as one 
day; and the result has been the Bible. Therefore I 
will not lose time in idle questions; I will study the 
book. It is the word of Moses, the word of Amos, the 
word of John, the word of Paul ; but still the thoughts 
expressed are God's thoughts, and the words are God's 
words. "■ Thou, Lord, hast spoken by the mouth of thy 
servant David." " The Spirit of the Lord spake by 
me," said he, " and his word was in my tongue." ^ 

It would then, in our view, be holding very erroneous 
language to say — certain passages in the Bible are man's, 
and certain passages in the Bible are God's. No; every 
verse without exception is man's; and every verse with- 
out exception is God's, whether we find him speaking 
there directly in his own name, or whether he employs 
the entire personality of the sacred MTiter. And as 
St Bernard has said of the living works of the regen- 
erated man, " that our will does nothing there with- 
out grace, but that grace does nothing there without 
our will;" so ought we to say, that in the Scriptures God 
has done nothing but by man, and man has done no- 
thing but by God. 

1 Acts iv. 26; 2 Sam. xxiii. 1, 2. See our chap. ii. sect. 2. 
5 



32 WITU INSPIRATION AS WITH GRACE. 

In fact, it is with divine inspiration as with efficacious 
grace. In the operations of the Holy Ghost while 
causing the sacred books to be written, and in those of 
the same divine agent wdiile converting a soul, and 
causing it to advance in the ways of sanctification, man 
is in diiferent respects entirely active and entirely pas- 
sive. God does all there ; man does all there ; and it 
may be said for both of these works what St Paul said 
of one of them to the Philippians, " It is God that 
worketh in you to will and to do." ^ Thus you will see 
that in the Scriptures the same operations are attributed 
alternately to God and to man. God converts, and it 
is man that converts himself. God circumcises the 
heart, God gives a new heart; and it is man that should 
circumcise his heart, and make himself a new heart. 
" Not only because, in order to obtain such or such an 
effect, we ought to employ the means to obtain such or 
such an effect," says the famous President Edwards in his 
admirable remarks against the errors of the Arminians, 
" but because this effect itself is our act, as it is our 
duty; God producing all^ and ice acting all."^ 

Such, then, is the Word of God. It is God speaking 
in man, God speaking by man, God speaking as man, 
God speaking for man ! This is what we have asserted, 
and must now proceed to prove. Possibly, how^ever, it 
will be as well that we should first give a more precise 
definition of this doctrine. 



SECTION IV. 

In point of theory, it were allowable to say that a 
religion might be divine without the books that teach 
it being miraculously inspired. It were possible, for 
example, to figure to ourselves a Christianity without 
divine inspiration ; and one might conceive, perhaps, 
that all the miracles of our fiiith have been performed 



Phil. ii. 13. - Edwards' Remavks.&c, p. 'J51. 



CHRISTIANITY WITHOUT CHRISTIANS. 33 

with the single exception of this one. On this sup- 
position (which nothing authorizes), the everlasting 
Father would have given his 8on to the world ; the 
creating Word, made flesh, would have submitted for 
us to the death of the cross, and caused to descend 
from heaven upon his apostles the spirit of understand- 
ing and the power of working miracles ; but, all these 
mysteries of redemption once consummated, he might 
have relinquished to these men of God the care of 
writing, according to their own wisdom, our sacred 
books ; and their writings would thus have presented 
no more than the natural language of their superna- 
tural illuminations, of their convictions, and their 
charity. Such an order of things, no doubt, is but 
an idle supposition, directly opposed to the testimony 
which the iScriptures have rendered -to what they are. 
But without saying here that it resolves nothing, and 
that, miracle for miracle, that of illumination is not less 
inexplicable than that of inspiration ; without saying, 
farther, that the Word of God possesses a divine power 
which belongs to it alone — such an order of things, 
granting it were a reality, would have exposed us to 
innumerable errors, and plunged us into the most dis- 
mal uncertainty. Upon what testimony could, in that 
case, our faith have rested? On something said by 
men ? But faith is founded only on the Word of God. 
— (Rom. x. 17.) In such a system, then, you would 
only have had a Christianity without Christians. De- 
prived of any security against the imprudence of the 
writers, you could not even have given their books the 
authority at present possessed in the Church by those 
of Augustine, Bernard, Luther, and Calvin, or of so 
many other men whom the Holy Ghost enlightened 
with a knowledge ol the truth. We are, in fact, suffi- 
ciently aware how many imprudent expressions and 
erroneous propositions have found their way into the 
midst even of the finest pages of those admirable doc- 
tors. And yet the apostles ion the supposition we 
have made) would have been far more subject to 



34 ANOTHER DEFINITION. 

serious mistakes even than they Avere, since they would 
not have had, like the doctors of the Church, a Word 
of God hy which to direct their own ; and since they 
themselves would liave had to compose the Avhole lan- 
guage of religious science. (A science is more than 
half formed when its language is formed.) What de- 
plorable and inevitable errors must have necessarily 
accompanied, in their case, this revelation without di- 
vine inspiration ! and in what deplorable doubts would 
their hearers have been left! — errors in the selection 
of facts, errors in the appreciation of them, errors in 
the statement of them, errors in the mode of conceiv- 
ing the relations they bear to doctrines, errors in the 
expression of those very doctrines, errors of omission, 
errors of language, errors of exaggeration, errors in 
adopting certain national prejudices, or prejudices arising 
from a man's rank or party, errors in the foresight of 
the future, and in judgments pronounced upon the past. 

But, thanks be to God, it is not thus with our 
sacred books. They contain no error; they are written 
throughout by inspiration of God. " Holy men spake 
as they were moved by the Holy Ghost;" they did so, 
" not with words that man's wisdom teacheth, but with 
words which the Spirit of God taught;" in such sort, 
that not one of these words should be neglected, and 
that we are called to respect them and to study them, 
even to their smallest iota and their slightest jot : for 
" this Scripture is pure, like silver refined seven times : 
it is perfect." 

These assertions, which are themselves testimonies 
of the AV'ord of God, have already comprised our last 
definition of Divine Inspiration, and lead us to charac- 
terise it, finally, as that inexplicable power which the 
Divine Spirit put forth of old on the authors of holy 
Scripture, in order to their guidance even in the em- 
ployment of the words they used, and to preserve them 
alike from all error and from all omission. 

This new definition, which might appear complex, 
is not so really ; for the two traits of which it is com- 



DIFFERENT KINDS OF PROOF. 35 

posed are equivalent, and to admit the one is to accept 
the other. 

AVe propose them disjunctive!}' to the assent of our 
readers, and we offer them the alternative of accepting 
either. One has more precision, the other more sim- 
plicity, in so far as it presents the doctrine under a 
form more disengaged from all questions relative to 
the mode of inspiration, and to the secret experiences 
of the sacred writers. Let either he fully accepted, 
and then there will have been rendered to the Scrip- 
tures the honour and the credit to which they are 
entitled. 

What we propose, therefore, is to establish the doc- 
trine of Divine inspiration under one or other of these 
two forms : — 

The Scriptures are given and warranted by God, even 
in their language ; and. The Scriptures contain no error 
— (whereby w^e understand that they say all that they 
ought to say, and that they do not say what they ought 
not to say.) 

Now, how shall a man establish this doctrine ? By 
the Scriptures, and only by the Scriptures. Once that we 
have recognised these as true, we must go to them. to be 
taught what they are ; and once that they have told us 
that they are inspired of God, it belongs to them farther 
to tell us how they are so, and how far they are so. 

To attempt the proof of their inspiration a priori — by 
arguing from that miracle being necessary for the se- 
curity of our faith — would be to adopt a feeble mode of 
reasoning, and almost to imitate, in one sense, the pre- 
sumption which, in another sense, imagines a priori 
four degrees of divine inspiration. Further; to think of 
establishing the entire inspiration of the Scriptures on 
the consideration of their beauty, their constant wisdom, 
their prophetic foresight, and all the characters of 
divinity which occur in them, would be to build on 
arguments no doubt just, but contestable, or at least 
contested. It is solely on the declarations of holy 
Scripture, therefore, that we have to take our stand. 



36 INSPIRATION A DOCTRINE. 

We have no authority but that for the doctrines of our 
faith ; and divine inspiration is just one of those doc- 
trines. 

Here, however, let us anticipate a misapprehension. 
It may happen that some reader, still but feebly estab- 
lished in his Christianity, mistaking our object, and 
thinking to glance through our book in search of 
arguments which may convince him, might jfind himself 
disappointed, and might conceive himself authorized to 
charge our line of argument with some vicious reason- 
ing, as if we wanted to prove in it the inspiration of the 
Scriptures by the inspiration of the Scriptures. It is 
of consequence that we should put him right. We have 
not written these pages for the disciples of Porphyry, 
or of Voltaire, or of Ilousseau ; and it has not been our 
object to prove that the Scriptures are worthy of belief. 
Others have done this, and it is not our task. We 
address ourselves to men who respect the Scriptures, 
and who admit their veracity. To these we attest, that, 
being true, they say that they are inspired; and that, 
being inspired, they declare that they are so throughout:, 
whence we conclude that they necessarily must be so. 

Certainly, of all truths, this doctrine is one of the 
simplest and the clearest to minds meekly and ra- 
tionally submissive to the testimony of the Scriptures. 
No doubt modern divines may be heard to represent it 
as full of uncertainties and dilficulties ; but they who 
have desired to study it only by the light of God's 
Word, have been unable to perceive those dilficulties, or 
to find those uncertainties. Nothing, on the contrary, 
is more clearly or oftener taught in the Scriptures than 
the Inspiration of the Scriptures. Accordingly, the 
ancients knew nothing on this subject of the embarrass- 
ments and the doubts of the doctors of the present day: 
for them the Bible was from God, or it was not from 
God. On this point antiquity presents an admirable 
unanimity.^ But since the moderns, in imitation of 

' See on this subject the learned dissertation in which Or Kudel- 
bach establidhca the sound doctrines ou iuapiratiou historically, as 



TESTIMONY OF SCRIPTURE. 37 

the Talmudistic Jews and Rabbins of the middle ages, 
have imagined learned distinctions bet^Yeen four or five 
ditFerent degrees of inspiration, Avho can wonder that for 
them difficulties and uncertainties have been multiplied ? 
Contesting what the Scriptures teach, and explaining 
what the Scriptures do not teach, it is easy to see how 
they come to be embarrassed ; but for this they have only 
their own rashness to blame. 

So very clear, indeed, is this testimony which the 
Scriptures render to their o^vn inspiration, that one may 
well feel amazed that, among Christians, there should 
he any diversities of opinion on so well-defined a sub- 
ject. But the evil is too easily explained by the power 
of preconceived opinions. The mind once wholly 
pre-occupied by objections of its own raising, sacred 
passages are perverted from their natural meaning in 
proportion as those objections present themselves ; and, 
by a secret effort of thought, people try to reconcile these 
with the difficulties that embarrass them. The plenary 
inspiration of the Scriptures is, in spite of the Scriptures, 
denied (as the Sadducees denied the resurrection), be- 
cause the miracle is thought inexplicable ; but we must 
recollect the answer made by Jesus Christ, " Do ye not 
therefore err, because ye know not the Scriptures, 
nor THE POWER OF God?" — (Mark xii. 24, 27.) It 
is, therefore, because of this too common disposition 
of the human mind, that we have thought it best not to 
present the reader with our scriptural proofs until after 
having completed our definition of divine inspiration, 
by an attentive examination of the part to be assigned 
in it to the individuality of the sacred writers. This 
will be the subject of the following section. No less do 
we desire being able to present the reader with a more 
didactic expression of the doctrine that occupies us, and 
of some of the questions connected with it : but we have 
thought that a more fitting place might be found for 

we have sought to establish them by Scripture. (Zeitschrift fur 
die gesamnite Lutherische Theologie und Kirclie, von Rudelbach 
und Guericke, 1840.) 



38 INDIVIDUALITY OF THE WRITERS. 

this derelopment elsewhere, partly because it will be 
more favourably received after our scriptural proofs 
shall have been considered ; partly because we have no 
desire, by employing the forms of the school, to repel, at 
the very threshold, unlearned readers who may have 
taken up these pages with the idea of finding something 
in them for the edification of their faith. 



SECTION V. 

ON THE INDIVIDUALITY OP THE SACRED WRITERS. 

The individuality of the sacred writers, so profoundly 
stamped on the books they have respectively written, 
seems to many impossible to be reconciled \nth a plenary 
inspiration. No one, say they, can read the Scriptures 
without being struck with the differences of language, 
conception, and style, discernible in their authors; so that 
even were the titles of the several books to give us no 
intimation that we w^ere passing from one author to 
another, still we should almost instantly discover, from 
the change of their character, that we had no longer to 
do with the same writer, but that a new personage had 
taken the pen. This diversity reveals itself even on 
comparing one prophet with another prophet, and one 
apostle witli another apostle. Who could read the 
writings of Isaiah and Ezekiel, of Amos and Hosea, of 
Zephaniah and Habakkuk, of Jeremiah and Daniel, and 
proceed to study those of Paul and Peter, or of John, 
without observing, with respect to each of them, how 
much his views of the truth, his reasonings, and liis hm- 
guage, have been influenced by his habits, bis condition 
in life, his genius, his education, his recollections — all 
the circumstances, in sbort, that have acted upon his 
outer and inner man ? They tell us wbat they saw, and 
just as they saw it. Their memory is put into requisition, 
their imagination is called into exercise, their alVections 
are drawn out — their whole being is at work, and their 



FALSE CONSEQUENCES DEDUCED FROM IT. 39 

moral physiognomy is clearly delineated. "We are sen- 
sible that the composition of each has greatly depended, 
both as to its essence and its form, on its author's cir- 
cumstances and peculiar turn of mind. Could the son 
of Zebedee have composed the Epistle to the Romans, as 
"\ve have received it from the apostle Paul ? Who 
-would think of attributing to him the Epistle to the 
Hebrews ? And although the Epistles general of Peter 
were without their title, who would ever think of ascrib- 
ing them to John ? It is thus, likewise, with the evan- 
gelists. AH four are very distinctly recognisable, 
although they all speak of the same Master, profess the 
same doctrines, and relate the same acts. Such, we 
are told, is the fact, and the following consequences are 
boldly deduced from it : — 

1. Were it God who speaks alone and constantly 
in the Scriptures, we should see, in their various parts, 
an uniformity which is not to be found there. 

2. It must be admitted that two different impulses 
have acted at the same time on the same authors, while 
they were composing the Scriptures ; the natural im- 
pulses of their indi-vdduality, and the miraculous im- 
pulses of inspiration. 

3. There must have resulted from the conflict, the 
concurrence, or the balanced action of these two forces, 
— an inspiration variable, gradual, sometimes entire, 
sometimes imperfect, and ofttimes even reduced to the 
feeble measure of a mere superintendence. 

4. The variable power of the Divine Spirit, in this 
combined action, must have been in the ratio of the 
importance and the difficulty of the matters treated of 
by the sacred author. He might even have abstained 
from any intervention when the judgment and the re- 
collections of the writer could suffice, inasmuch as God 
never performs useless miracles. 

" It belongs not to man to say where nature ends, 
and where inspiration begins," says Bishop Wilson.^ 

^ Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity, p. 506. 



40 ALLEGED DEGREES OF INSPIRATION. 

" The exajx2;eratioii we find in the notions which some 

Do 

have entertained of inspiration," says Dr Twesten, 
" does not consist in their having extended them to all, 
but in their having extended them to all equally. If 
inspiration does not exclude the personal action of the 
sacred authors, no more does it destroy all influence 
proceeding from human imperfection. But we may 
suppose this influence to be more and more feeble in the 
writers, in proportion as the matter treated of is more 
intimately related to Christ."^ 

Dr Dick recognises three degrees of inspiration in 
the holy Scriptures : — " 1 . There are many things in 
the Scriptures which the writers might have known, 

and probably did know, by ordinary means 

In these cases, no supernatural influence was neces- 
sary to enlighten and invigorate their minds ; it was 
only necessary that they should be infallibly preserved 
from error. 2. There are other passages of Scripture, 
in composing which the minds of the writers must 
have been supernaturally endowed with more than or- 
dinary vigour 3. It is manifest, with respect to 

m-any passages of Scripture, that the subjects of which 
they treat must have been directly revealed to the wri- 
ters." ^ 

5 Hence it follows, that if this plenary inspiration 
were sometimes necessary, still, with respect to matters 
at once easy and of no religious importance, there might 
be found in the Scriptures some harmless errors, and some 
of those stains ever left by the hand of man on all he 
touches. While the energies of the divine mind, by an 
action always powerful, and often victorious, enlarged 
the comprehension of the men of God, purified their 
affections, and led them to seek out, from among all 
their recollections of the past, those which might be 
most usefully transmitted to the Church of God, the 
natural energies of their own minds, left to themselves 
in so fiir as regarded All details of no consequence either 

1 Vorles. ucber die Dopniatik, tome i. 

2 See an Essay on the Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, by the 
late John Dick, D.D. Fourth edition. Glasgow, 1B40. Chapter 1. 



HUMAN INDIVIDUALITY ACKNOWLEDGED. 41 

to faith or virtue, may have led to the occurrence in the 
Scriptures of some mixture of inaccuracy and imperfec- 
tion. " We must not therefore,"" says M. T"\vesten, 
" attribute an unlimited infallibility to the Scripture, as 
if there were no error there. No doul)t God is truth, 
and in matters of importance all that is from him is 
truth ; but if all be not of equal importance, all does not 
then proceed equally from him ; and if inspiration does 
not exclude the personal action of the sacred authors, 
no more does it destroy all influence of human imper- 
fection." -^ 

All these authors include in their assumptions and 
conclusions the notion, that there are some passages in 
the Scriptures quite devoid of importance, and that there 
are others alloyed with error. We shall erelong repel 
with all our might both these imputations ; but this is 
not yet the place for it. The only question we have to 
do with here, is that respecting the living and personal 
form under which the Scriptures of God have been given 
to us, and its alleged incompatibility with the fact of a 
plenary inspiration. To this we proceed to reply. 

1, We begin by declaring how far we are from con- 
testing the fact alleged, while, however, we reject the 
false consequences that are deduced from it. So far 
are we from not acknowledging this human indivi- 
duality stamped throughout on our sacred books, that, 
on the contrary, it is with profound gratitude — with 
an ever-growing admiration — that we contemplate this 
living, actual, dramatic, humanitary character diffused 
with so powerful and charming an effect through all 
parts of the book of God. Yes (we cordially unite 
with the objectors in saying it), here is the phraseology, 
the tone, the accent of a Moses ; there, of a John : 
here, of an Isaiah ; there, of an Amos : here, of a Da- 
niel or of a Peter ; there, of a Nehemiah, there again 
of a Paul. We recognise them, listen to them, see 
them. Here, one may say, there is no room for mis- 
take We admit the fact ; we delight in studying it ; 
» Ui supra. 



42 INSPIRATION INEXPLICABLE. 

we profoundly admire it; and we see in it, as we shall 
have occasion more than once to repeat, one additional 
proof of the divine wisdom which has dictated the 
Scriptures. 

2. Of what consequence to the fact of the divine 
inspiration is the absence or the concurrence of the 
sacred writers' affections? Cannot God equally em- 
ploy them or dispense with them ? He ^Yho can make 
a statue speak, can he not, as he pleases, make a child 
of man speak ? He who rebuked by means of a dumb 
animal the madness of one prophet, can he not put into 
another prophet the sentiments or the words which suit 
best the plan of his revelations ? He that caused to 
come forth from the wall a hand, without any mind of 
its own to direct it, that it might write for him those 
terrible words, "■ 3Ie)ie, mene, tekel^ upharsin" could he 
not equally guide the intelligent and pious pen of his 
apostle, in order to its tracing for him such words as 
these : " 1 say the truth in Christy and my conscience 
hears me witness in the Holy Ghost^ that I have great 
heaviness and continual sorroio in my hearty for my 
brethren, my kinsmen according to the Jiesh^ and who 
are Israelites"! Know you how God acts, and how 
he abstains from acting? "Will you teach us the 
mechanism of inspiration ? Will you say what is the 
difference between its working where individuality is 
discoverable, and its working where individuality is not 
discoverable? Will you explain to us why the con- 
currence of the thoughts, the recollections, aaid the 
emotions of the sacred writers, should diminish aught 
of their theopneustia? and will you tell us whether this 
very concurrence may not form part of it ? There is a 
gulf interposed betwixt the fact of this individuality 
and the consequence you deduce from it ; and your 
understanding is no more competent to descend into 
that gulf to contest the reality of theopneustia than ours 
is to explain it. Was there not a great amount of indi- 
viduality in (he language of Caiaphas, Avhen that wicked 
man, full of the bitterest spite, aband(>ning himself to 



GOD ACTS BY MEANS. 43 

the counsels of his own evil heart, and little dreaming 
that he was giving utterance to the words of God, cried 
out in the Jewish council, " Ye know nothing at all, 
nor consider that it is expedient for us that one man 
should die for the people?" Certainly there was in 
these words, we should say, abundance of individuality; 
and yet we find it written that Caiaphas spake this not 
of hhnself {a<p' sauroD), but that, being high priest for 
that year, " he prophesied," unconsciously, that Jesus 
should die, ''in order that he might gather into one the 
children of God that were scattered abroad." — (John 
xi. 49-52.) 

Why, then, should not the same Spirit, in order to 
the utterance of the words of God, employ the pious 
affections of the saints, as well as the wicked and hypo- 
critical thoughts of his most detestable adversaries ? 

3. When a man tells us that if, in such or such a 
passage, the style be that of Moses or of Luke, of 
Ezekiel or of John, then it cannot be that of God — it 
were well that he would let us know what is God's 
style. One would call our attention, forsooth, to the 
accent of the Holy Ghost — would show us how to 
recognise him by the peculiar cast of his phraseology, 
by the tone of his voice ; and would tell us wherein, in 
the language of the Hebrews or in that of the Greeks, 
his supreme individuality reveals itself! 

4. It should not be forgotten, that the sovereign ac- 
tion of God, in the different fields in which it is dis- 
played, never excludes the employment of second 
causes. On the contrary, it is in the concatenation of 
their mutual bearings that he loves to make his mighty 
wisdom shine forth. In the field of creation he gives 
us plants by the combined employment of all the ele- 
ments — heat, moisture, electricity, the atmosphere, 
light, the mechanical attraction of the capillary vessels, 
and the manifold operations of the organs of vegetation. 
In the field of providence, he accomplishes the deve- 
lopment of his vastest plans by means of the unex- 
pected concurrence of a thousand millions of human 

6 



44 HUMAN PERSONALITY HOW EMPLOYED. 

wills, alternately intelligent and yielding, or ignorant 
and rebellious. " Herod and Pilate, with the Gentiles 
and the people of Israel" (influenced by so many di- 
verse passions), " were gathered together," he teJls us, 
only " to do whatsoever his hand and counsel had de- 
termined before to be done." Thus, too, in the field of 
prophecy does he bring his predictions to their accom- 
plishment. He prepares, for example, long before- 
hand, a warlike prince in the mountains of Persia, and 
another in those of Media ; the former of these he had 
indicated by name two hundred years before ; he unites 
them at the point named with ten other nations against 
the empire of the Chaldeans ; he enables them to sur- 
mount a thousand obstacles ; and makes them at last en- 
ter the great Babylon, at the moment when the seventy 
years, so long marked out for the captivity of the 
Jewish people, had come to a close. In the field of his 
miracles, even, he is pleased still to make use of second 
causes. There he had only to say, " Let the thing be, 
and it would have its being ;" but he desired, by em- 
ploying inferior agents, even in that case to let us know 
that it is he that gives power to the feeblest of them. 
To divide the Red Sea, he not only causes the rod of 
Moses to be stretched out over the deep — he sends from 
the east a mighty wind, which blows all night, and 
makes the waters go back. To cure the man tliat was 
born blind, he makes clay and anoints his eyelids. In 
the field of redemption, instead of converting a soul 
by an immediate act of his will, he presents motives to 
it, he makes it read the Gospel, he sends preachers to 
it ; and thus it is that, Avhile it is he who " gives us to 
will and to do according to his good pleasure," he "be- 
gets us by his own will, by the word of truth." Well, 
then, why should it not be thus in the field of inspira- 
tion (theopneustia) ? "Wherefore, when he sends forth 
his Word, should he not cause it to enter tlie under- 
standing, the heart, and the life of his servants, as he puts 
it upon their lips? AVhercfore should he not associate 
their personality with what they reveal to us ? Where- 



INTERMITTENT INSPIRATION UNTENABLE. 45 

fore slioukl not their sentiments, their history, their ex- 
periences, form part of their inspiration (theopneustia)? 

5. What may, moreover, clearly expose the error 
involved in this alleged difficulty, is the extreme in- 
consistency shown in the use that is made of it? In 
fact, in order to impugn the plenary inspiration of cer- 
tain portions of the Scriptures, the individuality with 
which they are marked is insisted on ; and yet it is 
admitted that other parts of the sacred hooks, in which 
this character is equally manifest, must have been given 
directly by God, even to the most minute details. 
Isaiah, Daniel, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the author of the 
Apocalypse, have each stamped upon their prophecies 
their peculiar style, features, manner- — in a word, their 
mark; just as Luke, Mark, John, Paul, and Peter have 
been able to do in their narratives, or in their letters. 
There is no vahdity, then, in the objection. If it proved 
any thing, it would prove too much. 

6. What still farther strikes us in this objection, and 
in the intermittent system of inspiration wdth which it 
is associated, is its triple character of complication, 
rashness, and childishness. Complication ; for it is as- 
sumed that the divine action, in dictating the Scriptures, 
intermitted or fell off as often as the passage falls in the 
scale of difficulty, or in the scale of importance ; and 
thus God is made to retire or advance successively in 
the mind of the sacred writer during the course of one 
and the same chapter, or one and the same passage ! 
Rashness ; for the majesty of the Scriptures not being 
recognised, it is boldly assumed that they are of no im- 
portance, and require no Avisdom beyond that of man, 
except in some of their parts. We add childishness ; 
one is afraid, it is alleged, to attribute to God useless 
miracles, — as if the Holy Ghost, after having, as is ad- 
mitted, dictated, word for word, one part of the Scrip- 
tures, must find less trouble in doing pothing more 
elsewhere than aiding the sacred author by enlightening 
him, or leaving him to write by himself under mere su- 
perintendence ! 



46 god's not a partial authorship. 

7. But this is by no means all. What most of all 
makes us protest against a theory according to which 
the Scriptures are classed into the inspired^ the half- 
inspired^ and the uninspired (as if this sorry doctrine 
behoved to flow from the individuality stamped upon 
them), is its direct opposition to the Scriptures. One 
part of the Bible is from man (people venture to say), 
and the other part is from God. And yet, mark what 
its own language on the subject is. It protests that 
" ALL Scripture is given hi/ inspiration of God." It 
points to no exception. What right, then, can we have 
to make any, when itself admits none ? Just because 
people tell us, if there be in the Scriptures a certain 
number of passages vs-hich could not have been written 
except under plenary inspiration, there are others for 
which it would have been enough for the author to 
Lave received some eminent gifts, and others still which 
might have been composed even by a very ordinary 
person ! Be it so ; but how does this bear upon the 
question ? When you have been told who the author 
of a book is, you know that all that is in that book is 
from him — the easy and the difiicult, the important and 
the unimportant. If, then, the whole Bible " is given 
by inspiration of God," of what consequence is it to the 
question that there are passages, in your eyes, more im- 
portant or more difficult than others ? The least among 
the companions of Jesus might no doubt have given us 
that 5th verse of the 11th chapter of St John, " Now 
Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus ; " as 
the most petty schoolmaster also might have composed 
that first line of Athalie, " Into his temple, lo ! I 
come, Jehovah to adore." But were we told that the 
great Kacine employed some village schoolmaster to 
write out his drama, at his dictation, should we not 
continue, nevertheless, still to attribute to him all its 
parts — its first line, the notation of the scenes, the names 
of the draiudtia pfrson(V, the indications of their exits 
and their entrances, as well as the most sublime strophis 
of his choruses ? If, then, God himself declaies to ua 



INSPIRATION NOT EXCITATION. 4? 

his having dictated the whole Scriptures, Avho shall 
dare to say that that 5th verse of the 11th chapter of 
St John is less from God than the sublime words with 
which the Gospel begins, and which describe to us the 
eternal Word ? Inspiration, no doubt, may be percep- 
tible in certain passages more clearly than in others ; 
but it is not, on that account, less real in the one case 
than in the other. 

In a word, were there some parts of the Bible without 
inspiration, no longer could it be truly said that the 
whole Bible is divinely inspired. No longer Avould it 
be throughout the Word of God. It would have de- 
ceived us. 

8. Here it is of special importance to remark, that 
this fatal system of a gradual, imperfect, and intermit- 
tent inspiration, has its origin in that misapprehension 
to which we have more than once had occasion to ad- 
vert. It is because people have almost always wished 
to view inspiration in the man, while it ought to have 
been seen only in the book. It is " All Scripture," 
it is all that is written^ that is inspired of God. We 
are not told, and we are not asked, how God did it. All 
that is attested to us is that He has done it. And what 
we have to believe is simply that, whatever may have 
been the method he took for accomplishing it. 

To this deceptive point of view, which some have 
thought good to take in contemplating the fact of in- 
spiration, the three following illusions may be traced : — 

First ; in directing their regards to inspiration in the 
sacred author, people have naturally been led to figure 
it to themselves as an extraordinary excitation in him, 
of which he was conscious, w^hich took him out of 
himself, wliich animated him, after the manner of 
the ancient Pythonesses, with an aj/latu divino, a di- 
vine fire, easily discernible; in such sort, that wherever 
his words are simple, calm, familiar, they have been 
unable to see how divine inspiration could be attributed 
to him. 

Next : in contemplating inspiration in persons, peo- 



48 ILLUSIONS DISPELLED. 

pie have farther been led to attribute to it different 
degrees of perfection, seeing they knew that the sacred 
authors had themselves received very different measures 
of illumination and personal holiness. But if you con- 
template inspiration in the book, then you nill imme- 
diately perceive that it cannot exist there in degrees. 
A word is from God, or it is not from God. If it be 
from God, it is not so after two different fashions. 
Whatever may have been the spiritual state of the 
writer, if all he writes be divinely inspired, all his words 
are from God. And (mark well) it is according to this 
principle that no Christian will hesitate, any more than 
Jesus Christ has done, to rank the scriptures of Solomon 
with those of JMoses, any more than those of Mark or 
of Matthew with those of the disciple whom Jesus 
loved — nay, with the words of the Son of God himself. 
They are all from God. 

Finally; by a third illusion, from contemplating in- 
spiration in the men who wrote the Scriptures, not in 
the Scriptures which they wrote, people have been na- 
turally led to deem it absurd that God should repeal 
miraculously to any one ichat that person knew already. 
They would, on this ground, deny the inspiration of those 
passages in which the sacred writers simply tell what 
they had seen, or simply state opinions, such as any 
man of plain good sense might express without being 
inspired. But it will be quite otherwise the moment 
inspiration is viewed, not as in the icriter, but as in that 
which is written. Then it will be seen that all has been 
traced under God's guidance — both the things which the 
writer knew already and those of which he knew no- 
thing. AVho is not sensible, to give an example, that 
the case in which J ahouhi dictate to a student a book 
on geometry, altogether differs from that in which, after 
having instructed him more or less perfectly in that 
science, I should employ him to compose a book on it 
himself under my auspices? In the latter work, it is 
true, he would require my intervention only in the 
difficult propositions ; but then, who would think of 



DIFFERENT STYLES ONE GOD. 49 

saying the book ■svas mine ? In the former case, on 
the contrary, all parts of the book, easy and difficult 
alike, from the quadrature of the transcendental curves 
to the theory of the straight line or of the triangle, 
would be mine. Well, then, so is it with the Bible. 
It is not, as some will have it, a book which God em- 
ployed men, whom he had previously enlightened, to 
write under his auspices. No — it is a book which he 
dictated to them ; it is the word of God ; the Spirit of 
the Lord spake by its authors, and his words were upon 
their tongues. 

9. That the style of Moses, Ezekiel, David, St Luke, 
and St John, may be at the same time God's style, is 
what a child might tell us. 

Let us suppose that some modern French author had 
thought good, at the commencement of the present cen- 
tury, to aim at popularity by borrowing for a time the 
style, we shall say, of Chateaubriand ; might it not then 
be said with equal truth, but in two different senses, 
that the style was the author's and yet the style too 
of Chateaubriand ? And if, to save the French from 
some terrible catastrophe by bringing them back to the 
Gospel, God should condescend to employ certain 
prophets among them, by the mouths of whom he should 
proclaim his message, would not these men have to 
preach in French ? AYhat, then, would be their style, 
and what would you require in it, in order to its being 
recognised as that of God ? If such were his pleasure, 
one of these prophets might speak like Fenelon, an- 
other like Bonaparte ; in which case there is no doubt 
that it would be, in one sense, the curt, barking, jerking 
style of the great captain ; also, and in the same sense, 
the sustained and varied flow of the priest of Cambray's 
rounded eloquence ; while in another, and a higher and 
truer sense, it would, in both these mouths, be the style 
of God, the manner of God, the word of God. No 
doubt, on every occasion on which he has revealed him- 
self, God might have caused an awful voice to resound 
from heaven, as of old from the top of Sinai, or on the 



50 ILLUSTRATIONS FROM MUSIC. 

banks of the Jordan.^ His messengers, at least, might 
have been only angels of light. But even then what 
languages would these angels have spoken ? Evidently 
those of the earth ! And if he behoved on this earth 
to substitute for the syntax of heaven and the vocabu- 
lary of the archangels, the words and the constructions 
of the Hebrews or the Greeks, why not equally have 
borrowed their manners, style, and personality ? 

10. This there is no doubt that he did, but not so as 
that any thing was left to chance. " Known unto him are 
all his works from the beginning of the world ; " ^ and 
just as, year after year, he causes the tree to put forth 
its leaves as well for the season when they respire the 
atmospheric elements, and, co-operating with the pro- 
cess at the roots, can safely draw nourishment from 
their juices, as for that in which the caterpillars that 
are to spin their silk on its branches are hatched and 
feed upon them ; just as he prepared a gourd for the 
v^ery place and the very night on which Jonah was 
to come and seat himself to the east of Nineveh, and 
when the next morning dawned, a gnaAving worm 
when the gourd was to be withered ; so, too, when 
he would proceed to the most important of his doings, 
and cause that Word to be written which is to outlast 
the heavens and the earth, the Lord God could prepare 
long beforehand each of those prophets, for the mo- 
ment and for the testimony to which he had fore- 
ordained them from eternity. He chose them, in suc- 
cession, for their several duties, from among all men 
born of women ; and, with respect to them, fulfilled in 
its porfection that saying, " Send, O Lord, by the hand 
thou shouldst send. " ' 

As a skilful musician, when he would execute a long 
score by himself, takes up by turns the funereal flute, 
the shepherd's pipe, the merry fife, or the trumjiet that 
summons to battle; so did Almighty God, Avlien he 
would make us hear his eternal word, choose out from 

1 Exo.l. xix.; John xii. 29. » Acta xv. 18. 8 Exod. iv. 121 



ORGANIST AT FREIBURG. 51 

of old the instruments which it seemed fit to him to 
inspire with the breath of his spirit. *' He chose them 
before the foundation of the world, and separated them 
from their mother's womb."-'^ 

Has the reader ever paid a visit to the astonishing 
organist, who so charmingly elicits the tourist's tears 
in the Cathedral at Freiburg, as he touches one after 
another his wondrous keys, and greets your ear by 
turns Avith the march of warriors on the river- side, the 
voice of prayer sent up from the lake during the fury 
of the storm, or of thanksgiving when it is hushed to 
rest ? All your senses are electrified, for you seem to 
have seen all, and to have heard all. Well, then, it was 
thus that the Lord God, mighty in harmony, applied, 
as it were, the finger of his Spirit to the stops which he 
had chosen for the hour of his purpose, and for the 
unity of his celestial hymn. He had from eternity 
before him all the human stops which he required ; his 
Creator's eye embraces at a glance this range of keys 
stretching over threescore centuries; and when he would 
make known to our fallen world the everlasting counsel 
of his redemption, and the coming of the Son of God, 
he put his left hand on Enoch, the seventh man from 
Adam,^ and his right on John, the humble and sub- 
lime prisoner of Patmos. The celestial anthem, seven 
hundred years before the flood, began with these words, 
'• Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousand of his 
saints, to execute judgment upon all ; " but already, in 
the mind of God, and in the eternal harmony of his 
work, the voice of John had answered to that of Enoch, 
and closed the hymn, three thousand years after him, 
with these words, " Behold, he cometh with clouds, and 
every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced 
him ! Even so. Lord Jesus, come quickly. Amen ! " 
And during this hymn of thirt}' centuries, the Spirit of 
God never ceased to breathe in all his messengers ; the 
angels, an apostle tells us, desired to look into its won- 

i Gal. i. 15; Eph. i. 4. 2 Jude 14. 



52 , VARIETIES OF STYLE — UNITY OF PLAN. 

drous depths. ^ God's elect were moved, and life 
eternal came down into the souls of men. 

Between Enoch and St John, listen to Jeremiah, 
twenty-four centuries after the one, and seven hundred 
years before the other, " Before I formed thee in the 
belly," saith the Lord, " I knew thee ; and before thou 
earnest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I 
ordained thee a prophet unto the nations." ^ In vain did 
this alarmed man exclaim, " Ah, Lord God ! behold, 
I cannot speak : for I am a child." The Lord answers 
him, " Say not, I am a child : for thou shalt speak 
whatsoever I command thee ;" and the Lord put forth 
his hand and touched his mouth, " Behold," said he, " I 
have put my words in thy mouth." 

Between Enoch and Jeremiah, listen to Moses. He, 
too, struggles on Mount Horeb against the call of the 
Lord, " Alas, O my Lord, I am not eloquent ; send, 
I pray thee, by the hand of him whom thou wilt send." 
But the anger of the Lord is kindled against Moses. 
"Who hath made man's mouth?" he says to him. 
'•• Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth, tmd 
will teach thee what thou shalt say." ^ 

Between Jeremiah and John, listen to Paul of Tarsus, 
" When it pleased God, who separated me from my 
mother's womb, to reveal his Son in me, he called me by 
his grace, that I might preach him among the heathen."* 

You see, then, it was sometimes the artless and sub- 
lime simplicity of John ; sometimes the impassioned, 
elliptical, rousing, and logical energy of Paul ; some- 
times the fervour and solemnity of Peter ; it was Isaiah's 
magnificent, and David's lyrical poetry ; it was tlie 
simple and majestic narratives of Moses, or the senten- 
tious and royal wisdom of Solomon — yes, it was all this ; 
it was Peter, it was Isaiah, it was Matthew, it was 
John, it was Moses ; yet it was God. 

"Are not all these which speak Galileans?" the 
people exclaimed on the day of Pentecost ; yes, they 

' 1 Peter i. 12. « Jerem. i. 5-7. 

8 Exod. iv. 10, &c. &c. ■• Gal. i. 15, 16 



DIVINE CHARM OF THE SCRIPTURES. 53 

are so ; but the message that is on their lips comes from 
another country — it is from heaven. Listen to it ; for 
tongues of fire have descended on their heads, and it is 
God that speaks to you by their mouths. 

11. Finally, we would fain that people should under- 
stand that this human individuality to which our atten- 
tion is directed in the Scriptures, far from leaving any 
stain there, or from being an infirmity there, stamps 
upon them, on the contrary, a divine beauty, and power- 
fully reveals to us their inspiration. 

Yes, we have said that it is God who speaks to us 
there, but it is also man ; — it is man, but it is also God. 
Admirable Word of God ! it has been made man in its 
own way, as the eternal Word was ! Yes, God has 
made it also come down to us full of grace and truth, 
like unto our words in all things, yet without error and 
sin ! Admirable Word, divine Word, yet withal full 
of humanity, much- to-be-loved Word of my God ! Yes, 
in order to our understanding it, it had of necessity to 
be put upon mortal lips, that it might relate human 
things ; and, in order to attract our regard, behoved to 
invest itself with our modes of thinking, and with all 
the emotions of our voice ; for God well knew whereof 
we are made. But we have recognised it as the Word 
of the Lord, mighty, efficacious, sharper than a two- 
edged sword ; and the simplest among us, on hearing 
it, may say like Cleopas and his friend, " Did not our 
hearts burn within us while it spoke to us ? " 

AVith what a mighty charm do the Scriptures, by 
this abundance of humanity, and by all this personality 
with which their divinity is invested, remind us that 
the Lord of our souls, whose touching voice they are, 
does himself bear a hum.an heart on the throne of God, 
although seated on the highest place, where the angels 
serve him and adore him for ever! It is thus, also, 
that they present to us not only that double character 
of variety and unity which already embelHshes all the 
other works of God, as Creator of the heavens and the 
earth ; but. further, that mingling of familiarity and 



54 MATCHLESS PERFECTION OF THE WORD. 

authority, of sympathy and grandeur, of practical de- 
tails and mysterious majesty, of humanity and divinity, 
which is recognisable in all the dispensations of the 
same God, as Redeemer and Shepherd of his Church. 

It is thus, then, that the Father of mercies, while 
speaking in his prophets, behoved not only to employ 
their manner as well as their voice, and their style as 
well as their pen ; but, further, often to put in opera- 
tion their whole faculties of thought and feeling. Some- 
times, in order to show us his divine sympathy there, 
he has deemed it fitting to associate their own recollec- 
tions, their human convictions, their personal experi- 
ences, and their pious emotions, with the words he dic- 
tated to them ; sometimes, in order to remind us of his 
sovereign intervention, he has preferred dispensing with 
this unessential concurrence of their recollections, affec- 
tions, and understanding. 

Such did the Word of God behove to be. 

Like Immanuel, full of grace and truth ; at once in 
the bosom of God and in the heart of man ; mighty 
and sympathizing ; heavenly and of the earth ; sublime 
and lowly; awful and familiar ; God and man ! Ac- 
cordingly it bears no resemblance to the God of the Ra- 
tionalists. They, after having, like the disciples of 
Epicurus, banished the Divinity far from man into a 
third heaven, would have had the Bible also to have 
kept itself there. " Philosophy employs the language 
of the gods," says the too famous Strauss of Ludwigsburg, 
" while religion makes use of the language of men." No 
doubt she does so ; she has recourse to no other ; she 
leaves to the philosophers and to the gods of this world 
their empyrean and their language. 

Studied under this aspect, considered in this charac- 
ter, the Word of God stands forth without its like ; it 
presents attractions quite unequalled ; it offers to men 
of all times, all places, and all conditions, boauti»^s ever 
fresh ; a ciiarm that never grows old, that always sa- 
tisfies, never palls. With it, what we find with respect 
to human books is reversed ; for it pleases ami fiuscinates, 



THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN. 55 

extends and rises in your regard the more assiduously 
you read it. It seems as if the book, the more it is 
studied and studied over again, grows and enlarges it- 
self, and that some kind unseen being comes daily to 
stitch in some fresh leaves. And thus it is that the 
souls, alike of the learned and the simple, who have 
long nourished themselves on it, keep hanging upon it 
as the people hung of old on the lips of Jesus Christ.^ 
They all think it incomparable; now powerful as the 
sound of mighty waters ; now soft and gentle, like the 
voice of the spouse to her bridegroom ; but always per- 
fect, " always restoring the soul, and making wise the 
simple." ^ 

To what book, in this respect, would you liken it ? 
Go and put beside it the discourses of Plato, or Se- 
neca, or Aristotle, or Saint Simon, or Jean Jacques. 
Have you read Mahomet's books ? Listen to him but 
for one hour, and your ears will tingle while beaten on 
by his piercing and monotonous voice. From the first 
page to the last, it is still the same sound of the same 
trumpet; still the same Medina horn, blown from the 
top of some mosque, minaret, or war-camel; still sybil- 
line oracles, shrill and harsh, uttered in an unvarying 
tone of command and threat, whether it ordain virtue 
or enjoin murder ; ever one and the same voice, surly 
and blustering, having no bowels, no familiarity, no 
tears, no soul, no sympathy. 

After trying other books, if you experience religious 
longings open the Bible ; listen to it. Sometimes you 
find here the songs of angels, but of angels that have 
come down among the children of Adam. Here is the 
deep-sounding organ of the Most High, but an organ 
that serves to soothe man's heart and to rouse his con. 
science, alike in shepherd's cots and in palaces; alike 
in the poor man's garrets and in the tents of the desert. 
The Bible, in fact, has lessons for all conditions; it 
brings upon the scene both the lowly and the great; it 

^ Luke xix. 48 : o x««f yx^, x.t x. 2 pg, xix. 7. 



56 MAJESTIC UNITY DRAMATIC CHARM. 

reveals equally to both the love of God, and unveils in 
both the same miseries. It addresses itself to children; 
and it is often children that show us there the way to 
heaven and the great things of Jehovah. It addresses 
itself to shepherds and herdsmen ; and it is often shep- 
herds and herdsmen who lift up their voices there, and 
reveal to us the character of God. It speaks to kings 
and to scribes ; and it is often kings and scribes that 
teach us there man's wretchedness, humiliation, confes- 
sion, and prayer. Domestic scenes, confessions of con- 
science, pourings forth of prayer in secret, travels, pro- 
verbs, revelations of the depths of the heart, the holy 
courses pursued by a child of God, weaknesses unveiled, 
falls, recoveries, inward experiences, parables, familiar 
letters, theological treatises, sacred commentaries on 
some ancient Scripture, national chronicles, military 
annals, political statistics, descriptions of God, portraits 
of angels, celestial visions, practical counsels, rules of 
life, solutions of cases of conscience, judgments of the 
Lord, sacred hymns, predictions of future events, nar- 
ratives of what passed during the days preceding our 
creation, sublime odes, inimitable pieces of poetry; — all 
this is found there by turns; and all this meets our 
view in most delightful variety, and presenting a whole 
whose majesty, like that of a temple, is overpowering. 
Thus it is, that, from its first to its last page, the Bible 
behoved to combine with its majestic unity the indefin- 
able charm of human-like instruction, familiar, sympa- 
thetic, personal, and the charm of a drama extending 
over forty centuries. In the Bible of Desmarets, it is 
said, " There are fords here for lambs, and there are 
deep waters where elephants swim." 

But behold, at the same time, what unity, and, lo ! 
what innumerable and profound harmonies in this im- 
mense variety! Under all forms it is still the same 
truth; ever man lost, and God the Saviour; ever man 
with his posterity coming forth out of Eden and losing 
the tree of life, and the second Adam with his pt^ople 
re entering paradise, and regaining possession oi" thf 



THE BIBLE CANNOT BE FROM MAN, 57 

tree of life; ever the same cry uttered in tones innu- 
merable, " heart of man, return to thy God, for he 
pardoneth! We are in the gulf of perdition; let us 

come out of it; a Saviour hath gone down into it 

He bestows holiness as he bestows life." 
• " Is it possible that a book at once so sublime and so 
simple can be the work of man?" was asked of the 
philosophers of the last century by one Avho was him- 
self too celebrated a philosopher. And all its pages 
have replied, No — it is impossible; for every where, tra- 
versing so many ages, and w^hichever it be of the God- 
employed writers that holds the pen, king or shepherd, 
scribe or fisherman, priest or publican, you every where 
perceive that one same Author, at a thousand years' in - 
terval, and that one same eternal Spirit, has conceived 
and dictated all ; — every where, at Babylon as at Horeb, 
at Jerusalem as at Athens, at Rome as at Patmos, you 
will find described the same God, the same world, the 
same men, the same angels, the same future, the same 
heaven ; — every where, whether it be a poet or a his- 
torian that addresses you, whether it be in the plains of 
the desert in the age of Pharaoh, or in the prisons of 
the capitol in the days of the Ceesars — every where in 
the world the same ruin; in man the same impotency; 
in the angels the same elevation, the same innocence, 
the same charity; in heaven the same purity, the same 
happiness, the same meeting together of truth and 
mercy, the same mutual embracing of righteousness and 
peace; the same counsels of a God who blotteth out ini- 
quity, and who, nevertheless, doth not clear the guilty. 
We conclude, therefore, that the abundance of hu- 
manity to be found in the Scriptures, far from compro- 
mising their divine inspiration, is only one farther mark 
of their divinity. 



58 SCRIPTURAL PROOF. 



CHAPTER II. 



SCRIPTURAL PROOF OF THE DIVINE INSPIRATION. 

Let us open the Scriptures. — What do they say of their 
inspiration ? 



SECTION I. 

ALL SCRIPTURE IS DIVINELY INSPIRED, 

We shall commence by reproducing here that oft- 
repeated passage, 2 Tim. iii. 16, ''^ All Scripture ii' 
given hy mspiration of God;" ^ that is to say, all parts of 
it are given by the Spirit or by the breath of God. 

This statement admits of no exception and of no re- 
striction. Here there is no exception ; it is all Scrip- 
ture ; it is all that is written {rraGa yoa:pri) ; meaning 
thereby the thoughts after they have received the stamp 
of language. — No restriction; all Scripture is in such 
wise a work of God, that it is represented to us as 
uttered by the divine breathing, just as human speech 
is uttered by the breathing of a man's mouth. The 
prophet is the mouth of the Lord. 

The purport of this dechiration of St Paul remains 
the same in both the constructions that may be put 
upon his words, w^iether we place, as our versions do, 
the affirmation of the phrase on the word ^id-7:\ii\j6T0(; 
{divinely inspired)^ and suppose the verb to be imder- 

> See further upon this passage, our Chap. III. question 27. 



SCRIPTURAL MEANING OF PROPHECY, ETC. 59 



stood {all Scripture is divineli/ inspired^ prqfltahle ... .); 
or, making the verb apply to the words that folloAv, we 
understand ^goVi/guorog {divineh^ inspired) only as a 
determinative adjective (all Scripture dir'iyiely inspired 
of God^ \% profitable . . .). — Tliis last construction would 
even give more force than the first to the apostle's de- 
claration. For then, as his statement would necessarily 
relate to the whole Scripture of the holy Letters (ra 
'£^a j^6.ix^oiroL\ of which he had been speaking, would 
assume, as an admitted and incontestable principle, that 
the simple mention of the holy Letters implies of itself 
that Scriptures inspired hy God are meant. 

Nevertheless it will be proper to give a farther ex- 
pression of this same truth, by some other declaration 
of our holy books. 



SECTION II. 

ALL THE PROPHETIC UTTERANCES ARE GIVEN BY GOD. 

St Peter in his second epistle, at the close of the first 
chapter, thus expresses himself : " Knowing this first, 
that no Scripture is of any private interpretation. For 
the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man ; 
but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the 
Holy Ghost." — Note on this passage : 

1. That it relates to written revelations {'7r^o:p7irs/a 

2. That never (ov 'ttotI) did any of these come through 
the impulsion or the government of a tcill of man; 

3. That it w^as as urged or moved hy the Holy Ghost 
that those holy men wrote and spoke ; 

4. Finally, that their writings are called by the name 
oi prophecy. 

It will be proper then, before we proceed farther, to 
have the scriptural meaning of these words prophecy^ 
prop^hesy^ prophet (^'?^), precisely determined ; because 
it is indispensable for the investigation with which we 



60 WHAT IS A PROPHET ? 

are occupied, that this be known, and because the know- 
ledge of it will throw much light on the whole ques- 
tion. 

Various and often very inaccurate meanings have 
been given to the biblical term prophet ; but an atten- 
tive examination of the passages in which it is em- 
ployed, will soon convince us that it constantly desig- 
nates, in the Scriptures, " a man whose mouth uttei-s 
the words of God." 

Among the Greeks, this name was at first given only 
to the interpreter and the organ of the vaticinations 
pronounced m the temples (s^rr/rjrrig hkm (Mayniuvj. 
This sense of the w^ord is fully explained by a passage 
in the Timaeus of Plato.* The most celebrated prophets 
of pagan antiquity were those of Delphos. They con- 
ducted the Pythoness to the tripod, and were charged 
with the interpretation of the oracles of the god, or the 
putting of them into writing. And it was only after- 
wards, by an extension of this its first meaniufj, that 
the name of prophet w^as given among the Greeks to 
poets, who, commencing their songs with an invocation 
of Apollo and the Muses, were deemed to give utterance 
to the language of the gods, and to speak under their 
inspiration. 

A prophet, in the Bible, is a man, then, in whose 
mouth God puts the words which he wishes to be heard 
upon earth ; and it was farther by allusion to the ful- 
ness of this meaning that God said to Moses,^ that 
Aaron should be his prophet unto Pharaoh, according 
as he had told him (at chap. iv. ver. 16) : " He shall be 
to thee instead of a mouth, and thou shalt be to him 
instead of God." 

Mark, in Scripture, how the prophets testify of the 
Spirit that makes them speak, and of the wholly divine 
authority of their words : you will ever find in their 
language one uniform definition of their ofiice, and of 
their inspiration. They speak ; it is, no doubt, their 

' Tom. IX. ed. Bipont., p. 3S2. « Exod. vii. 1. 



liO^V DID THE WORD COME ? 61 

voice that makes itself heard ; it is their person that is 
agitated ; it is, no doubt, their soul also that often is 
moved ; — but their words are not only theirs ; they are, 
at the same time, the words of Jehovah. 

" The mouth of the Lord hath spoken ;" — " the Lord 
hath spoken," they say unceasingly.^ — " I will open my 
mouth in the midst of them," saith the Lord to his 
servant Ezekiel. — "The Spirit of the Lord spake by 
me, and his word was in my tongue," said the royal 
psalmist.- — "Hear the word of the Lord!" It is thus 
that the prophets announce what they are about to 
say.^ — " Then was the word of the Lord upon me," is 
what they often say. — " The word of God came unto 
Shemaiah ;" — " the word of God came to Nathan ;" — 
" the word of God came unto John in the wilderness ;" * 
— " the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord ; " ^ — 
" the burden of the word of the Lord by Malachi ;"^ 
— " the word of the Lord that came unto Hosea ;"' ' — 
" In the second year of Darius, came the word of the 
Lord by Haggai, the prophet." ^ 

This word came down upon the men of God when 
it pleased, and often in the most unlooked-for manner. 

It is thus that God, when he sent Moses, said to 
him, " I will be with thy mouth;" ^ and that, when he 
made Balaam speak, "he put a word in Balaam's 
mouth." ^^ The apostles, too, quoting a passage from 
David in their prayer, express themselves in these 
words : " Thou, Lord, hast said by the mouth of thy 
servant David." ^ And St Peter, addressing the mul- 
titude of the disciples : " Men and brethren, this scrip- 
ture must needs have been fulfilled, which the Holy 

* Micah iv. 4; Jer. ix. 12,xiii. 15, xxx. 4, 1. 1. li. 12; Isa. viii. 11; 
Amos iii, 1; Ex'd. iv. 30; Deut. xviii. 21, 22; Josh. xxiy. 2. 

2 2 Siim. xxiii. 1,2. 3 Isa. xxviii. 14; Jer. xix. 3. x, 1, xvii. 20. 

* 1 Kin<rs xii. 22; 1 Chron. xvii. 3; Luke iii. 2. 

* Jer. xi. 1, vii. ], xviii. 1, xxi. 1, xxvi. 1, xxvii. 1, xxx. 1 ; and in 
many other places. See Ezek. i. 3; Jer. L 1,2,9, 14; Ezek. iii. 
4, 10. 11; Ho3. i. 1,2, &c. 

6MaI. i. 1. 7Ho3. i. 1. a Hag. i. 1. 

9 Exod. iv. 12, 15. lo 'uifiaX»9 («' •); Num. xxiii. 5. 
" Acts iv. 25. 



62 PROPHETS — FALSE PROPHETS. 

Ghost, by the mouth of David, spake before concern- 
ing Judas." ^ The same apostle also, in the holy place, 
under Solomon's porch, cried to the people of Jerusalem, 
" But those things which God before had showed by 
THE MOUTH OF ALL HIS PROPHETS, that Christ should 
suffer, he hath so fulfilled." ^ 

In the view of the apostles, thien, David in his 
psalms, and all the prophets in their writings, whatever 
might be the pious emotions of their souls, were onlj 
the mouth of the Holy Ghost. It was David avho spoke; 
it was the prophets who showed ; but it was also God 
THAT SPAKE BY THE MOUTH of David, his Servant ; it 
was God WHO showed by the mouth of ail his pro- 
phets.— (Acts i. 16, iii. 18, 21, iv. 25.) 

And, yet again, let the reader be so good as carefully 
to examine, as it stands in the Greek, that expression 
which recurs so often in the Gospel, and which is so 
conclusive, " That it might be fulfilled which was 
spoken by the prophet, — (and even) which was spoken 
OF THE LORD BY THE PROPHET, (aia rou 
'X^o(pyirov^ — and even, TIIO rov Kv^tov AIA roZ cr^o^j^roy), 
saying."^ ..... 

It is in a quite analogous sense that holy scripture 
gives the name oi prophets and oi false prophets to im- 
postors, who lied among the Gentiles, in the temples of 
the false gods, whether they were only common cheats, 
falsely pretending to visions from God, or whether they 
were really the mouth or an occult power, of a malevo- 
lent angel, of a spirit of Python.* 

And it is, farther, in the same sense that St Paul, in 
quoting a verse of Epimenides, a poet, priest, and 
soothsayer among the Cretans, called him '■'• one of their 
prophets;" because all the Greeks consulted him as an 
oracle; because Nicias was sent into Crete by the Athen- 

» Acts i. 16. 2 Acts. iii. 18, 

8 iMiitt. i. 22, ii. 5, 15, 23, xiii. 3,5, xxi. 4, xxrii. 9, iv. 14, viii. 17, 

xii. 17. 

* Acts xiii. 6; Jer. xxix. l-H; 2 Kin;;? xviii. 19. The LXX. often 

renri- • r -r: ' y -^ivloT^ixfirKs. (Jer. vi, 13, xxvi. 7, 8, 11, 16, xxix 

1,8; Z . .x.i. 2). 



THREE KINDS OF PROPHESYING. 63 

ians to fetch liim to purify their city; and because 
Aristotle, Strabo,^ Suidas,^ and Diogenes Laertius,^ tell 
us that he undertook to foretell the future, and to dis- 
cover things unknown. 

From all these quotations, accordingly, it remains 
established, that in the language of the Scriptures the 
prophecies are " the words of God put into the mouth 
of man." 

Accordingly, it is by a manifest abuse also, that in 
common language people seem to understand no more 
by that word than a miraculous prediction. The pro- 
phecies could reveal the past as well as the future ; they 
denounced God's judgments ; they interpreted his 
Word ; they sang his praises ; they consoled his people; 
they exhorted souls to holiness ; they testified of Jesus 
Christ. 

And as ^^ no prophecy came hy the will of man^"^ a 
prophet, as we have already intimated, was such only 
at intervals, " and as the Spirit gave him utterance." — 
(Acts ii. 4.) 

A man prophesied sometimes without foreseeing it, 
sometimes too without knowing it, and sometimes even 
without desiring it. 

I have said, without foreseeing it ; and often at the 
very moment when he could least expect it. Such was 
the old prophet of Bethel. — (1 Kings xiii. 20.) I have 
said, without knowing it; such was Caiaphas. — (John 
xi. 51.) Finally, I have said, without desiring it; such 
was Balaam, when, wishing three times to curse Israel, 
he could not, three successive times, make his mouth 
utter any words but those of benediction. — (Numb, 
xxiii. xxiv.) 

We shall give other examples to complete the demon- 
stration of what a prophecy generally is, and thus to 
arrive at a fuller comprehension of the extent of the 
action of God in what St Peter calls written prophecy 
(T_^o^?jre/ai' y.^a(pr^g). 

1 Georg. lib. x. 2 jn voce Y.ir![jnv. 

8 Vita Epimen. * 2 Pet. i. 21. 



64 FACTS AND PRINCIPLES. 

We read in the 11th of Numbers (25th to the 29th 
verses), that, as soon as the Lord made the Spirit to 
rest upon the seventy elders, " they prophesied ; " hut 
(it is added) " they did not cease." The Spirit, theii, 
came upon them at an unexpected moment , and atttr 
he had thus " spoken hy them," and his word " had 
been upon their tongue," (2 Sam, xxiii. 2), tliey pre- 
served nothing more of this miraculous gift, and wt-re 
prophets only for a day. 

We read in the First Book of Samuel (x. 11), with 
what unforeseen power the Spirit of the Lord seized 
young king Saul at the moment when, as he sought for 
his father's she-asses, he met a company of propliets who 
came down from the holy place. " What is this that is 
come to the son of Kish," said they one to another; " Is 
Saul also among the prophets ?" 

We read at the 19th chapter, something still more 
striking. Saul sends to Kamah men who were to take 
David ; but no sooner did they meet Samuel and the 
company of prophets over whom he was set, than the 
Spirit of the Lord came upon these men of war, and 
" they also prophesied." Saul sends others, and " they 
also prophesy." Saul at last goes thither himself, and 
" he also prophesied all that day and all that night be- 
fore Samuel." " The Spirit of God," we are told, " avas 

UPON HIM." 

But it is particularly by an attentive study of the 1 2th 
and 14th chapters of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, 
that one obtains an exact knowledge of what tlie action 
of God, and the part assigned to man severally, were in 
prophecy. 

The apostle there gives the Church of Corinth the 
rules that were to be followed in the use of this mira- 
culous gift. His counsels will be found to throw a deal 
of light on this important subject. One will then re- 
cognise at once the following facts and principles : — 

1. The Holy Ghost at that time conferred upon the 
faithful, for the common advantage, a great variety of 
gifts (xii. 8-10) ; — to one that of miracles ; to anotlicr 



NATURE OF THE PROPHETIC GIFTS. 65 

that of healing ; to another, discerning of spirits ; to 
another, divers kinds of tongues, which the man him- 
self did not understand -when he spoke them ; to another, 
the interpretation of tongues ; to another, in fine, pro- 
pheq/ — that is, uttering with his own tongue words 
dictated by God. 

2. One and the selfsame Spirit divided severally as 
he would these ditierent miraculous poAvers.-^ 

3. These gifts were a just subject of Christian desire 
and ambition. (^^^Xo^rs, xiv. 1, 39.) But the one that 
was to be regarded as the most desirable of all, was that 
of prophcsjixng ; for one could speak an unknown 
tongue without edifying any body, and that miracle 
was "useful rather to the unbelievers than to belie- 
vers;" whereas " he that prophesied spoke unto men 
to edification, and exhortation, and comfort." — (1 Cor. 
xiv. 1-3 ) 

4. That prophecy — that is to say, those words that fell 
miraculously on the lips that the Holy Ghost had 
chosen for such an office — that prophecy assumed very 
different forms. Sometimes the Spirit gave a psalm, 
sometimes a doctrine, sometimes a revelation ; some- 
times, too, it was a miraculous interpretation of that 
which others had miraculously expressed in strange 
tongues.^ 

5. In those prophecies there was evidently a work of 
God and a work of man. They were the words of the 
Holy Ghost ; but they were also the words of the pro- 
phet. It was God that spoke, but in men, by men, for 
men ; and there you would have found, as on other oc- 
casions, the sound of their voice — perhaps also the 
habitual peculiarities of their style — perhaps, moreover, 
allusions to their own experience, to their position at the 
time, to their individuality. 

6. These miraculous facts continued in the primitive 
Church throughout the long career of the apostles. St 
Paul, who wrote his letter to the Corinthians twenty 

1 Verse 11. See also Eph. iv. 7 ; and Acts xix. 1 to 6. 
a Ver. 26 to 31; and I Sam. x. 6; xviii. 10. 



66 THE SCRIPTURES WRITTEN PROPHECIES. 

years after tlie death of Jesus Christ, speaks of them as 
a common and habitual order of things, for some time 
existing among them, and which ought still to continue. 

7. The prophets, although they were the mouth of 
God to make his words heard, were not, however, abso- 
lutely passive while engaged in prophesying. 

" The spirits of the prophets," says St Paul, " are 
subject to the prophets" (1 Cor. xiv. 32) ; that is to 
say, that the men of God, while his prophetic word was 
on their lips, could nevertheless check its escape by the 
repressive action of their own wills ; nearly as a man sus- 
pends, when he wishes to do so, the almost involuntary 
course of his respiration. Thus, for example, if any 
revelation came upon one of those that were sitting, 
the first that spoke had then " to hold his peace, sit 
down, and let him speak." 

Let us now apply these principles and these facts 
to the prophecy of Scripture (r^ T^o^7;r£/a ypa:prtc), and 
to the passage of St Peter, for the explanation of which 
we have adduced them. 

"• No prophecy of the Scripture," says he "is of any 
private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old 
time by a will of man : but holy men of God spake as 
they were moved by the Holy Ghost." — (2 Pet. i. 21.) 

Here, then, we have the plenary and entire inspira- 
tion of the Scriptures clearly established by the apostle ; 
here we have the Scripture assimilated to those pro- 
phecies which we have just defined. It " came not by 
a will of man ;" it is entirely dictated by the Holy Ghost ; 
it gives us the very words of God ; it is entirely ['h^iog 
and 0s6'7rviv(froc) given by the breath of G(h1. 

Who would dare then, after such declarations, to 
maintain, that in the Scriptm-es the expressions are not 
inspired ? They are M'ritten propheciks (rratra rr^otprj- 
Tiicc y^al:ric). One sole difficulty, accordingly, is all 
that can any longer be opposed to our conclusion. The 
testimony and the reasoning on Avhich it rests, are so 
clearly valid, that one can elude them only by this ob- 
jection. We agree, it ^vill be said, that writttMi prophecy 



ALL OLD TESTAMENT SCRIPTURE PROPHETIC. 6? 

(cr^o^Tjrs/a yoa^T^g) has, without contradiction, been 
composed by that power of the Holy Ghost which was 
put forth in the prophets ; but the rest of the book, the 
Epistles, the Gospels, and the Acts, the Proverbs, the 
Books of Kings, and so many other purely historical 
writings, are not entitled to be put in the same rank. 

Here, then, let us pause ; and, before replying, see 
clearly the extent of our argument. 

It ought already to be fully acknowledged, that all that 
part of (he Scriptures at least called prophecy, what- 
ever it be, has been completely dictated hy God; so that the 
words as well as the thoughts have been given by him. 

But who now will permit us to establish a distinction 
between any one of the books of the Bible, and all the 
other books ? Is not all given by prophecy? Certainly 
all has equally God's warrant ; this is what we proceed 
to prove. 



SECTION III. 

ALL THE SCRIPTURES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT ARE PROPHETIC. 

And, first of all, all the Scriptures are without dis- 
tinction called The Word of God. This title is suffi- 
cient of itself to demonstrate to us, that if Isaiah began 
his prophecies by inviting the heavens and the earth to 
give ear because the Lord had spoken,^ the same sum- 
mons ought to come forth for us from all the books of 
the Bible, for they are all called " The Word of God." 
" Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth \ for the Lord 
hath spoken !" 

Nowhere shall we find a single passage that permits 
MS to detach one single part of it as less divine than all 
the rest. When we say that this whole book is the 
Word of God, do we not attest that the very phrases of 
which it is composed have been given by him ? 

1 Isa. i. 2. 



68 ALL PARTS OF THE SCRIPTURES INSPIRED. 

But the whole Bible is not only called " The WordoJ 
God" (o Xoyog rov Qiov) ; it is called, without distinc- 
tion, The Oracles of God (ra Xoyicc rov ©joH).^ Who 
knows not what oracles were held to be in the ideas of 
men in ancient times ? Was there a word that could 
more absolutely express a verbal and complete inspira- 
tion ? And as if this term, which St Paul employs, were 
not sufficient, we farther hear Stephen, filled Avith the 
Holy Ghost, call them the living oracles {7,6-/ m 
XJ^vra) ; " Moses," he says, " received the lively ora- 
cles, to give them unto us." — (Acts vii. 3S.) 

All the Scriptures then, without exception, are a 
continuous word of God ; they are his miraculous voice ; 
they are his written prophecies and his lively oracles. 
Which of their various parts, then, would you dare to 
cut off? The apostles often distinguish two parts in 
them^ when they call them " Moses and the Prophets." 
Jesus Christ distinguished them into three parts ^ when 
he said to his apostles, " That all things must be ful- 
filled which were written in Moses, and in the Prophets, 
and in the Psalms, concernino: me " Accordinjx to this 
division, then, in which our Lord speaks according to 
the language of that time, the Old Testament would be 
made up of these three parts, — Moses, the Prophets, and 
the Psalms ; as the New Testament is composed of the 
Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles, and the I3ook of the 
Revelation. Which, then, of these three parts of the 
Old Testament, or which of these four parts of the 
New, would you dare to withdraw from the Scripture 
of the prophets (•r^o^^jre/as /f^f^g), or from the insjnred 
Word {svdsuv Xoyo-u — y^a:pr,c ho-vsvffrov)! 

AVould it be Moses ? But what more holy and more 
divine, in the whole Old Testament, than the writings 
of that man of God ? He was in such sort a prophet 
that his holy books are placed above all the rest, and 
are called emphatically The Law. ITe was in such 
sort a prophet, that another prophet, speaking of his 

1 Rom. ill. 2. ' Luke xxiv. 44. 



ALIKE THE LAn' AND THE PROPHETS. 69 

books alone, said, " The law of the Lord is perfect" 
(Ps. xix. 7) ; " The words of the Lord are pure words, 
as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven 
times." — (Ps. xii. 6.) He was in such sort a prophet ot 
God, that he is compared by himself to none but the 
Son of God. " This is that Moses," it is -written, " who 
said to the children of Israel, A prophet shall the Lord 
your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto 
me; him shall ye hear." — (Acts vii. 37.) He was in such 
sort a prophet, that he was accustomed to preface his 
orders with these words : "Thus saith the Lord." He was 
in such sort a prophet, that God said to him, "Who hath 
made man's mouth ? have not I, the Lord ? Now there- 
fore go ; and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee 
what thou shalt say." — (Exod. iv. 11.) Finally, he was 
in such sort a prophet, that it is written, " And there 
arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, 
whom the Lord knew face to face." — (Deut. xxxiv. 10.) 

What other part of the Old Testament, then, would 
you exclude from the prophetic Fcriptures? Shall it 
be the second ? — that which Jesus Christ calls llie Pro- 
'pheU^ and which comprises all the Old Testament, ex- 
clusive of Moses and the Psalms, and sometimes ex- 
clusive of Moses alone ? It is well worth noting, that 
Jesus Christ, and the apostles, and the whole people, 
habitually call by the name of prophets all the authors 
of the Old Testament. They were wont to say, in order 
to designate the whole Scriptures, " Moses and the pro- 
phets."— (Luke xxiv. 25, 27, 44; Matt. v. 17, vii. 12, 
xi. 13, xxii. 40; Luke xvi. 16, 29, 31, xx. 42; Acts 
i. 20, iii. 21, 22, vii. 35, 37, viii. 28, xxvi. 22, 27, 
xxviii. 23; Rom. i. 2, iii. 21, x. 5, &c. &c.) Jesus 
Christ called all their books The Prophets : — they were 
prophets. Joshua, then, was a prophet ; the authors of 
the Chronicles were prophets, quite as Isaiah, Jeremiah, 
Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, and all the rest were, down 
to Malachi. 

They wrote then, all of them, the prophetic Scrip- 
lures {'rPo(pr}Tslav /ga^Jjg) ; all, the words of which St 



70 SCRIPTURE PONDERED BY THOSE WHO WROTE IT. 

Peter has said, " that none of them came by a will of 
man ; " all, those h^a 'yodfxfj.aru, those holy letters, 
which the apostle declares to be " divinely inspired." ^ 
The Lord said of all of them as of Jeremiah, " Lo, I have 
put my words in thy mouth ;"^ and as of Ezekiel, 
'• Son of man, go, speak unto them my words : speak 
unto them, and tell them, Thus saith the Lord 
God. "3 

And that all the phrases, all the words, were sug- 
gested to them by God, is demonstrated by a fact 
stated to us more than once, and in the study of their 
writings frequently brought under our eye, to wit — that 
they were charged to transmit to the Cliurch oracles, 
the meaning of which was to remain veiled to their own 
minds. Daniel, for example, declares more than once, 
that he was unable to seize the prophetic meaning of 
the words that proceeded from his own lips, or were 
traced with his hand.* The types, impressed by God 
on all the events of primitive history, were not to be 
recognised till many centuries after the death of the 
men who were commissioned to relate to us their lead- 
ing features ; and the Holy Ghost informs us that the 
prophets, after having written out their sacred pages, 
set themselves to study them with the most respectful 
attention, as they would have done with the other 
Scriptures, " searching what, or what manner of time 
THE Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, 
vhen it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, 
and the glory that should follow."^ Behold, then, these 
men of God bending over their own writings. Then^ 
they ponder the words of God and the thoughts of 
God. Can this cause you any surprise, seeing that they 
have written for the elect of the earth, and for the prin- 
cipalities and powers of heaven, the doctrines and the 
glories of the Son of God, and seeing these are things 
" into which the angels desire to look?"* 

12 Tim. in. J 6. » Jer. i. 9. 

8 Ezek. iii. 10, 11. * Dan. xii. 4, 8. 9, viii. 27, x. 8, 21. 

*! 1 Pet. i. 10,11, 12. 6Kph. iii. 10, 11. 



TrsmrONY CF DAVID of ZACii.vlUAH. 71 

So much for Moses and for the Prophets ; but 
what will you say of the Psalms ? Shall we consider 
these less given by the spirit of prophecy than all the 
rest ? Are not the authors of the Psalms always called 
prophets f ^ And if they are sometimes, like Moses, 
distinguished from the other prophets, is it not evidently 
in order that a place of greater eminence may be as- 
signed them ? " David was a prophet," says St Peter. 
— (Acts ii. 30.) Mark what he himself says he is: "The 
Spirit of the Lord spake by me," says he, " and his 
WORD v/AS UPON MY TONGUE-" — (2 Sam. xxiii. 1,2.) 
" What David wrote," and even his words in detail, ^^ he 
wrote SPEAKING BY THE HoLY Ghost," Said our Lord. 
— (Mark xii. 36.) The apostles also, quoting him (in 
their prayer), take care to say, " This Scripture must 
needs have been fulfilled which the Holy Ghost by the 
mouth of David spake." — (Acts i. 16.) "Lord, thou 
art God, who by the mouth of thy servant David hast 
said." — (Acts iv. 25.) What do I say? These psalms 
were to such a degree all dictated by the Holy Ghost, 
that the Jews, and the Lord Jesus Christ himself, call 
them by the name of The law;^ all their utterances had 
the force of law ; their smallest words were from God. 
"Is it not written in your law?" said Jesus while 
quoting them, and in quoting them even for a single 
WORD (as we shall soon have occasion to show). 

The whole Old Testament then is, in a scriptural 
sense of the expression, a written prophecy (crgof >jrg/a 
y^a^Tig). It is plenarily inspired therefore by God, 
seeing that, according to the testimony of Zachariah, 
" it is God who spake by the mouth of his holy pro- 
phets, which have been since the world began ;"^ and 



^ Matt. xiii. 35; for Asaph (Ps. Ixxviii.) 

2 John X. 34. St Paul (Rom. iii. 19) calls the whole Old Testa- 
ment equally by the name of law, and more especially Isaiah, the 
Proverbs, and the Psalms (which he quotes). This remark has 
not escai>ed Chrysostoui (Hoinil. viii.): ivrocvOee, rovs '■pxXfji.ovi No'ittay 
i«»X£c-ey ; and Theophylact adds, xoe.) rk rov 'Ha-xiov. 

3 Luke i. 70. 



72 PROBABILITIES WEIGHED. 

because, according to that of Peter, " they spoke as they 
were moved by the Holy Ghost." ^ 

It is true that thus far our reasonings, and the tes- 
timonies on which they are founded, directly relate to 
the books of the Old Testament only; and it might 
possibly be objected to us that as yet we have proved 
nothing for the New. 

We shall begin, before we reply, with asking, If it 
were likely that the Lord could have designed giving 
successive revelations to his people, and that, neverthe- 
less, the latest and the most important of these should 
be inferior to the first ? We would ask, If it be rational 
to imagine that the first Testament, which contained 
only " the shadows of things that were to come," could 
have been dictated by God in all its contents; while the 
second 'I'estament, which sets before us the grand ob- 
ject to which all those shadows relate, and which de- 
scribes to us the works, the character, the person, and 
the sayings even of the Son of God, was to be less 
inspired than the first? We would ask, If one can 
believe that the Epistles and the Gospels, which were 
destined to repeal many of the ordinances of Moses 
and the Prophets, could be less divine than Moses and 
the Prophets; and that the Old Testament could be 
throughout an utterance of thought on the part of God, 
while it was to be replaced, or at least modified and 
consummated, by a book emanating partly from man 
and partly from God ? 

But there is no need even of our having recourse to 
these powerful inductions in order to establish the pro- 
phetic inspiration of the Gospel ; nay, its superiority to 
Moses and the prophets. 

i 2 Pet. i. 21. See also Matt. i. 22, xxii. 43; Mark xH. 36. 



NEW TESTAMENT CERTAINLY INSPIRED. 73 

SECTION IV. 

ALL THE SCRIPTUREg OF THE NEW TESTAMENT ARE PROPHETIC. 

The Avliole tenor of Scripture places tlie writers ot 
the New Testament in the same rank with the prophets 
of the Old; and even when it establishes any difference 
between them, it is always in putting the last in date 
above the first, in so far as one of God's sayings is su- 
perior (not doubtless in divinity, not in dignity, but 
in authority) to the saying that preceded it. 

Let the reader be so good as attend to the following 
passage of the apostle St Peter. It is very important, 
inasmuch as it lets us see that, in the lifetime of the 
apostles, the book of the New Tesfament was already 
almost entirely formed, in order to make one whole to- 
gether with that of the Old. It was twenty or thirty 
years after the day of Pentecost that St Peter felt grati- 
fied in referring to all the epistles of paul, his be- 
loved brother, and spoke of them as sacred writings 
which, even so early as his time, formed part of the 
Holy Letters ('uporj ypa/j./j^drMv), and behoved to bo 
classed with the other Scriptures (wg x.ai rag Xoi'zag, 
y^a(pug). He assigns them the same rank, and de- 
clares that " unlearned men can wrest them but to their 
own destruction." Mark this important passage : " Our 
beloved brother Paul also according to the wisdom 
given unto him hath written unto you ; as also in all 
his epistles, speaking in them of these things ; in which 
are some things hard to be understood, which they that 
are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the 
other Scriptures, unto their own destruction." ^ 

The apostle, at the second verse of the same chapter, 
had already placed himself, along with the other apostles, 
on the same rank, and assumed the same authority, as 
the sacred writers of the Old Testament, when he said : 

1 2 Peter iii. 15, 16. 



74 NEW TESTAMENT WRITERS — THEIR MISSION. 



" That ye may be mindful of the words which were 
spoken before by the holy prophets, and of the com- 
mandment OF us the APOSTLES of the Lord and Sa- 
viour." 

The writings of the apostles, then, were that which 
those of the Old Testament %vere; and these being a 
WRITTEN PROPHECY — that is to Say, something spoken 
altogether by God — the latter are no less so. 

But we have said the Scripture goes much farther in 
the rank it assigns to the writers of the New Covenant. 
It teaches us to consider them as even superior to those 
of the Old, whether as respects the importance of their 
mission, or the glory of the promises made to them, or 
the greatness of the ^i/ts conferred on them — or, in fine, 
the eminence of the raiik assigned to them. 

1. First, let us distinctly perceive what their mission 
was, compared with that of the ancient prophets; and 
it will at once be seen, from passages bearing on this 
point, that their inspiration could not be inferior to that 
of their predecessors. 

When Jesus sent the apostles whom he had chosen, 
it is written, he said to them : " Go ye therefore, and 
teach all nations; teaching them to observe all things 
whatsoever I have commanded you : and, lo, I am 
WITH YOU alway, even unto the end of the world, 
Araen."^ " But ye shall receiA^e power, after that the 
Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be Avitnesses 
unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in 
Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth." ' 
" Peace be unto you : as my Father hath sent mf, even 

so SEND I YOU." ^ 

Such was their mission. They were the immediate 
envoj/s (ocroffroXoi) of the Son of God ; they Avent to all 
nations ; they had the assurance that their Master \vould 
be present with the testimony they were to bear to him 
in the holy Scri])tures. Did they require, then, less in- 
spiration for their going to the ends of the earth, and 

» Matt, xxviii. 19. 20. » Acts i. 8. » John xx. 21. 



PR(nTTSES MADE TO THEM. 75 

to make disciples of all nations, than the prophets re- 
f] ; :(-d for going to Israel and teaching that one people, 
tlie Jews? Had they not to promulgate all the doc- 
triiies, all the ordinances, all the mysteries of the king- 
dom of" God ? Had they not to bear " the keys of 
the kingdom of heaven" in such sort, that whatsoever 
they should hind or loose on earth should be bound or 
loosed in heaven ? ^ Had not Jesus Christ expressly con- 
ferred the Holy Ghost upon them for this end, that 
sins might he remitted or retained with regard to those 
to whom they should remit or retain them? Had he 
not breathed upon them, saying, " Receive the Holy 
Ghost?" Had he not to reveal to them the wondrous 
character of the Word made flesh, and of the Creator 
so abased as to take upon him the form of a creature, 
and even to die upon the cross ? Had they not to re- 
port his inimitable words? Had they not to perform 
on earth the miraculous intransmissible functions of 
his representatives and of his ambassadors, as if it had 
heen Christ that spoke by them?^ Were they not 
called to such a glory, " that, in the great final regene- 
ration, when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of 
his glory, they also should sit upon twelve thrones, 
judging the twelve tribes of Israel?"^ If, then, the 
prophetic Spirit was necessary for the former men of 
God, in order to show the Messiah under the shadows, 
was it not much more necessary for them, in order to 
their bringing him out into the light, and to their evi- 
dently setting him forth as crucified amongst us,^ in 
such a manner that he that despiseth them despisefh 
);ini, and he that heareth them heareth him?^ Let one 
judge by all these traits what the inspiration of the New 
Testament behoved to have been, compared with that 
of the Old ; and let one say whether, while the latter 
was wholly and entirely prophetic, that of the New 
could be any thing less. 

2. But this is not all ; listen further to the promises 

1 Matt, xviii. 18, xvi. 19. 22 Cor. v. 20. a Matt. xix. 28. 
4Gal. iii. i. « Luke x. 16; 



76 THE FULLEST INSPIRATION PROMISED. 



that were made to them for the performance of such a 
work. No human language can express with greater 
force the most absolute inspiration. These promises 
were for the most part addressed to them on three great 
occasions : first, when sent out for the first time to 
preach the kingdom of God ; ^ next, when Jesus him- 
self delivered public discourses on the gospel before an 
immense multitude, gathered by tens of thousands 
around him ; ^ third, when he uttered his la&t denuncia- 
tion against Jerusalem and the Jewish nation.^ 

" But when they deliver you up, take no thought 
HOW or WHAT ye shall speak ('Trug ri r/), for it shall 
be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak. 
For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of youu 
Father which speaketh in you." 

" And when they bring you unto the synagogues, 
and unto magistrates and powers, take ye no thought 
how or what thing ye shall answer, or what ye shall 
say ; for the Holy Ghost shall teach you in the same 
HOUR what ye ought to say," " Take no thought be- 
forehand what ye shall speak, neither do ye preme- 
ditate, but whatsoever shall be given you in that 
hour, that speak ye ; for it is not ye that speak, but 
the Holy Ghost." 

On these different occasions, the Lord assured his 
disciples that the fullest inspiration would regulate their 
language in the most difficult and important moments 
of their ministry. When they should have to speak to 
princes, they were to feel no disquietude ; they were not. 
even to premeditate, they were not even to take thonaht 
about it, because there would then be immediateb,' glnn 
to them by God, not only the things they were to say, 
but the words also in which those things Avere to be ex- 
pressed ; not only r/, but Twg XaXr.Go^^rai. — (Matt. x. 
19, 20.) They behoved to cast themselves entirely on 
him ; it would be g'lPe?! them entirely ; it would be 
given them by Jesus ; it would be given them in that 

> Matt. X. 19, 20. « Luke xii. 12. 

8 Mark xiii. 11: Luke xxi. 14, 15. 



A FORTIORI PROOF. 77 



same hour ; it would be given them in such a manner, 
and in such plenitude, that they should be able then to 
say that it was 7io more the?/, but the Holy Ghost, the 
Spirit of their Father, which spoke in them ; ^ and 
that then also it was not only an irresistible wisdom 
that was given them, it was a mouth? 

" Settle it therefore in your hearts, not to meditate 
before what ye shall answer; for I will give you a 
mouth and wisdom which all your adversaries shall not 
be able to gainsay or resist." 

Then (as w4th the ancient prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, 
Ezekiel) it shall be the Holy Ghost that will speak by 
them, as God spoke by his holy prophets since the 
world began.^ In one sense, indeed, it was they that 
were to speak ; but it shall be the Holy Ghost who will 
teach them (Luke xii. 12) in that same hour what they 
are to say ; so that, in another sense, it was to be the 
Holy Ghost himself that was to speak by their lips. 

We ask if it w^ere possible, in any language, to express 
more absolutely the most entire inspiration, and to de- 
clare with more precision, that the very words were then 
vouched by God and given to the apostles? 

No doubt, in these promises there is no direct refer- 
ence to the support which the apostles were to receive 
as writers ; and that they bear rather on what they were 
to expect, when they had to appear be-fore priests, be- 
fore governors, and before kings. But is it not evident 
enough, that if the most entire inspiration we\e assured 
to them * for passing exigencies, to shut the mouths of 
some wicked men, to conjure the perils of a day, and to 
subserve interests of the narrowest range ; if it were 
promised them, notwithstanding that the very words of 
their answers should then be given to them by means of 
a calm, mighty, but inexplicable operation of the Holy 
Ghost, — is it not evident enough that the same assistance V 

could not be refused to those same men, when, like the 
ancient prophets, they had to continue the book of 

1 Matt. X. 2a 8Lukexxi. 15. 

8 Acts iii. 21. * Luke xii. 12. 



A FORTIORI PROOF CONTINUED. 



God's oracles ; and so to hand down to all succeeding 
ages the laws of the kingdom of heaven, and describe 
the glories of Jesus Christ and the scenes of eternity ? 
Can any one suppose that the men who, before Ananias, 
or Festus, or Nero, were in such sort " the mouth of the 
Holy Spirit," that then it was no longer they that spoke, 
but that Spirit, should, when writing the everlasting 
Gospel, have returned to the condition of ordinary 
beings merely enlightened, denuded of their previous in- 
spiration, no longer speaking by the Holy Ghost, and 
thenceforward employing only words dictated by human 
wisdom^ (^dsXYi/xari avd^do'rrau naJ Iv diduKroTg dvd^urr/vi]i 
(Toipiag Xoyoig) ? This is quite inadmissible. 

3. See them, further, commencing their apostolic 
ministry on the day of Pentecost : see what gifts they 
received. 

Tongues of fire descend on their heads ; they are 
filled with the Holy Ghost ; they leave their upper 
chamber, and a vast multitude hears them proclaim, in 
fifteen different languages, the wonderful works of God ; 
they speak as thi<: Spirit gives them utterance;^ they 
speak (it is said) the Word of God (^sXaXov^ rw Xoyov 
rov 6ioii.y Assuredly, the icorcfs of those foreign lan- 
guages must have been then supplied to them as well as 
the things, the expression as well as the thoughts, the tw; 
as well as the r/. — (Matt. x. 19.; Luke xii. 11.) 
Now then will it be believed, that the Spirit could have 
taken care to dictate all that they behoved to say, for 
preaclungs at the corners of the streets, for words which 
passed awa}'' with the sound of their voices, and which, 
after ail, reached only some thousands of hearers ; 
while those same men, when they came afterwards to 
write for all' earth's nations, and for all ages of the 
Church, "the lively oracles of God," were to be deprived 
of their first assistance ? AVill it be believed, that after 
having been more than the ancient prophets as respects 
preaching in public, they were to be less than those 

iAct8ii.4. «Actsiv. 31. 



THE APOSTLES WERE ALL PROPHETS. 79 

prophets, and were to become ordinary men, when they 
took the pen to finish the Book of tlie Prophets, to write 
their Gospels, their Epistles, and the Book of" the Revela- 
tion ? The unreasonableness and inadmissibility of 
such a supposition are felt at once. 

4. But here we have to say something still more 
simple and more peremptory. We would speak of the 
rank that is assigned them ; and indeed, after what we 
said of the prophets of the Old Testament, we might 
even have limited ourselves to this simple fact, that the 
apostles were all of them prophets, and more than 

PROPHETS. 

Their writings, therefore, are written prophecies 
(•T^of '/j-g/a y^afrtg)^ as much, and even more, than those 
of the Old Testament ; and hence Ave are led to con- 
clude once more, that all Scripture in the New Testa- 
ment, as well as in the Old, is inspired of God, even to 
its smallest particles. 

I have said that the apostles were all prophets. They 
often declare this ; but, not to multiply quotations un- 
necessarily, we content ourselves here with appealing to 
the two following passages of the apostle 8t Paul. 

The first is addressed to the Ephesians (iii. 4, 5) : 
"Whereby," he tells them, "when ye read what I 
WROTE before in a few words, ye may understand my 
knowledge in the mystery of Christ, which in other ages 
was not made known unto the sons of men, as it is now 
revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets by the 
Spirit." 

One clearly sees, then, here the apostle and prophet 
Paul, the apostles and prophets Matthew, John, Jude, 
Peter, James, received by the Spirit the revelation of 
the mystery of Christ; and wrote about it as prophets. 

Further, it is of the same mystery, and of the writ- 
ings of the same prophets, that that same apostle speaks 
in the second of the passages we have indicated, that 
is, in the last chapter of his Epistle to the Romans.^ 

1 Rom. xvi. 25-27. 



so THE APOSTLFS MORE THAN PROPHETS. 

" Now to him that is of power to estaljlish you ac- 
cording to ray gospel, and the preaching of Jesus Christ, 
according to the revelation of the mystery, which was 
kept secret since the world hegan, but now is made 
manifest, and by the Scriptures of the prophets 
(^/a rg y^oL^oov 'jT^oT^ririTim)^ according to the command- 
ment of the everlasting God, made known to all nations 
for the obedience of faith : to God only wise, be glory 
through Jesus Christ for ever. Amen !" 

Here, then, we have the authors of the New Testa- 
ment again called prophets ; we have their writings 
called prophetical writings {ypcKpu) rrDoZTiriKai. the 
equivalent of the '^rgof/jrs/a y^a^r^g of St Peter). And 
since we have already seen that no prophecy ever came 
by the will of him that uttered it, but that it was as 
moved and impelled by the Holy Ghost that holy men 
of God spake ; the prophets of the New Testament 
spoke therefore like those of the Old, and ace 'rding to 
the commandment of the everlasting God. They were 
all of them prophets.' 

But we may advance a step farther; for, as we have 
said, they were more than prophets. Here again we 
have a remark of the learned Michaelis.^ Loose as are 
his principles on the inspiration of a part of the New 
Testament, this has not escaped his notice. It is clear, 
according to him, looking to the context, that, in the 
judgment pronounced by Jesus Christ on John Baptist 
(Matt. xi. 9, 11), the terms .^rm^ and little of the 11th 
verse, apply only to the title oi prophet which precedes 
them at the Oth verse; so that Jesus Christ there de- 
clares, that if John Baptist is the greatest of the prophets 
— if he is even more than a prophet — still the least of the 
prophets of the New Testament is greater than John 
Baptist; that is to say, greater than the greatest of the 
Old Testament prophets.' 

Besides, this superiority of the apostles and prophets 

1 See further Luke xi. 49; Eph. ii. 20, iii. 5, iv. 11; Gal. i. 12; 
1 Pet. i. 12; 1 Cor. xii. 28; 1 Thesa. ii. 15. 
» Introd., t. i. ]). 118, French edition, a lb., nnd Luke vii. 211 



THE APOSTLES PUT ABOVE THE PROPHETS. 81 

of the New Testament, is more than once attested to us 
in the apostolical writings. 

Every where, when mention is made of the different 
offices established in the Churches, the apostles are 
placed above the prophets. 

Take, for example, a very remarkable passage of the 
1st Epistle to the Corinthians. The apostle's object is 
to make known to us the gradations of excellence and 
dignity among the several miraculous charges consti-- 
tuted by God in the primitive Church, and he expresses 
himself as follows : — " And God hath set some in the 
Church, first apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly 
TEACHERS, after that miracles, then gifts of healings, 
helps, governments, diversities of tongues.^ 

At the fourth chapter of his Epistle to the Ephesians, 
at verse 11, he again puts the apostles above the pro- 
phets. 

At chapter ii. ver. 20, he calls the apostles, apostles 
and PROPHETS. And at chapter xiv. of the 1st Epistle 
to the Corinthians, he places himself above the pro- 
phets whom God had raised up in that Church. His 
wish is, that every one of them, if he have really re- 
ceived the Holy Ghost, should employ the gifts he has 
received in acknowledging that the things that he 
"wrote unto them were the commandments of the Lord ; 
and so fully convinced is he that what he writes is dic- 
tated by inspiration of God, that, after having dictated 
orders to the Churches, and concluded them with these 
■words, which nothing short of the highest inspiration 
could sanction, It is thus I ordain in all the Churches^ 
he goes farther, he proceeds to rank himself above the 
prophets; or rather, being himself a prophet, he calls 
upon the spirit of prophecy in them to acknowledge the 
words of Paul as the words of the Lord ; and he ends 
with these remarkable expressions : — " What ? came the 

word of God out from you ? If any man think 

himself to be a prophet, or spiritual, let him acknow - 

1 1 Cor. xii. 28. 



82 PAUL ATTESTS HIS DIVINE AUTHORITY. 

ledge that the things that I write unto you are the 

COMMANDMENTS OF THE LoRD." ^ 

The writings of the Apostles, then, are (like those of 
the ancient prophets) the commandments of the ever- 
lasting God; they are ''written prophecies" {'7r^ofr,Tsia. 
y^a^pTJg)^ as much as the Psalms, and Moses, and the 
prophets (Luke xxiv. 44) ; and all their authors then 
could say with St Paul, Christ speaks in me (2 Cor. 
xiii. 3 ; 1 Thess. ii. 13) ; what I say is the word of God, 
and the things I speak are taught me by the Holy 
Ghost (1 Cor. ii. 13) ; quite as David before them had 
said, " The spirit of the Lord spake by me, and his 
word was in my tongue." ^ 

Mark, besides, their own words, when they speak of 
what they are. "Would it be possible to declare more 
clearly than they have done, that words as well as sub- 
ject have been given them by God. " As for us," they 
say, " «r0 have the mind of ChrUt." — (1 Cor. ii. 16.) 
" For this cause also thank we God without ceasing, 
because, when ye received the word of God which ye 
heard of us, ye received not the word of men, but (as it 
is in truth) the word of God." — (1 Thes. ii. 13.) " He 
therefore that despiseth, despiseth not man, but God, wdio 
hath also given unto us his holy Spirit." — (iThes.jv. 8.) 

Such then, in fine, is the word of the New Testa- 
ment. It is like that of the Old, a word uttered by 
prophets, and by prophets greater even than those that 
preceded them ; in such sort, for example, as has been 
very well remarked by IMichaelis,^ that an epistle com- 
mencing with these Avords, " Paul, an apostle of Jesus 
Christ,"* thereby gives us a higher attestation of his 
divine authority and his divine inspiration, than could 
have been given even by the writings of the most 
illustrious prophets of the Old Testament when they 
began with these words, " Thus saith the Lord"' — "The 

I Unv!Act.rtxe{. 1 Cor. xiv. 36", 37. 

« ? Sam. xxiii. 2. 

3 Introd. tome 1, p. 118, 119, &c., French edition. 

* Rom. i. 1 ; (lal. i. 1 ; Cor. i. 1., kc; 1 Pet. i. 1 ; 2 Pet. i. 1. 

* lea. hi. 1 ;xrni. Ijand^JflxWm. 



M\r<K AND T.T'Kr: WFRK PU' PTTPTS. 83 

vision of Isainh" — " Tlie word that Isaiah sr.w"^ — 

" the words of Jeremiah to wliom the word of 

the Lord came"^ — "Hear the word of the Lord" — or 
such like analogous expressions. And if there be in the 
New Testament some books where such inscriptions 
are not to be found, their inspiration is no more com- 
promised thereby than this or that book of the Old 
Testament (the second or the ninety-fifth psalm, for 
example) ;^ which, although they have not the names of 
the prophets that composed them, are not the less 
quoted as divine by Jesus Christ and his apostles. 

The objection has sometimes been started that Luke 
and Mark were not apostles, properly so called ; and 
that consequently they did not receive the same inspi- 
ration as the other sacred writers of the New Testament. 
True, they were not apostles ; but they were certainly 
prophets, and they were even greater than the greatest 
of those of the Old Testament. — (Luke vii. 26, 28.) 

Without insisting here on the ancient traditions,* which 
say that both were of the number of the seventy disciples 
whom Jesus sent at first to preach in Judea, or at least 
of those one hundred and twenty on whom the tongues 
of the Holy Ghost descended on the day of Pentecost ; 
are such objectors not aware that the apostles had re- 
ceived the power of conferring, by the imposition of 
hands, miraculous gifts on all who believed, and that 
they exercised this power in all the countries and all the 
cities whither they directed their steps ? And since St 
Luke and St Mark were, amid so many other prophets, 
the fellow- workers chosen by St Paul and St Peter, is 
it not clear enough that these two apostolic men must 
have bestowed upon such associates the gifts which 
they dispensed to so many besides who had believed ? 
Do we not see Peter and John first go down to Samaria 
to confer these gifts on the believers of that city ; this 

• Isa. i. 1, ii. 7, and elsewhere. 2 j^r. i. 2. 
8 Acts iv. 25, xiii. 33; Heb. i. 5, iii. 7, 17, iv. 3, 7, v. 5. 

* Epiph., Heeres., 51 and others — Orig., De recta in Deum fide. 
Doroth. in Synopsi. — Procop. Diacon,, apud Bolland., 25th April. 



84 PROPHETS ABOUNDED IN THE EARLY CHURCH. 

followed by Peter coming to Cesarea, tliere to shecl them 
on all the Gentiles who had heard the word in the house 
of the centurion Cornelius?^ Do we not see St Paul 
bestow them abundantly on the believers of Corinth, on 
those of Ephesus, on those of Rome?^ Do we not see 
him, before employing his dear son Timothy as his 
fellow- labourer, causing spiritual powers to descend 
upon him ?^ And is it not evident that St Peter must 
have done as much for his dear son Mark,* as St Paul 
did for his companion Luke?^ Silas, whom St Paul 
had taken to accompany him (as he took Luke and 
John, whose surname was Mark), Silas was a prophet 
at Jerusalem." Prophets abounded in all the primitive 
churches. Many were seen to come down from Jerusa- 
lem to Antioch;^ a great many were to be found in 
Corinth;® Judas and Silas were prophets in Jerusalem. 
Agabus was such in Judea ; farther, four daughters, 
still in their youth, of Philip the evangelist, were pro- 
phetesses in Cesarea ;® and in the Church of Antioch, 
there were to be seen many believers who were prophets 
and doctors ;^^ among others Barnabas (St Paul's first 
companion), Simeon, Manaen, Saul of Tarsus him- 
self ; and, finally, that Lucius of Cyrene, who is 
thought to be the Lucius whom Paul (in his Epistle to 
the Romans) calls his kinsman, ^^ and whom (in his 
Epistle to the Colossians) he calls Luke the pJu/si- 
cian ;^ in a word, the St Luke whom the ancient 
fathers call indifferently Lucas, Lucius, and Lucanus. 

From these facts, then, it becomes sufficiently evident 
that St Luke and St Mark ranked at least among the 
prophets whom the Lord had raised up in such num- 
bers in all the Churches of the Jews and the Gentiles, 

lActsviii. 15, 17. 

2 Acts six. 6, 7; 1 Cor. xii, 28, xiv; Rom. i. 11, xv. 19, 29. 

8 1 Tim. iv. 14; 2 Tim. i. 6. *\ Pet. v. J 3. 

» Acts xiii. 1, xvi. 10, xxvii. 1 ; Rom. xvi. 21 ; Col. iv. 14; 2 Tim. 
iv. li ; Philcm. 24; 2 Cor. viii. 18. « Acts xv. 32. 
7 Acts xi. 27. 8 1 Cor. xii. 19, 20, xiv. 31, 39. 

9 Acts xi. 28, xxi. 9, 10. »o Acts xiii. 1, 2. 
» Rom. xvi. 21. ^^ Col. iv. 14. 



NrW TESTAMENT CANON — HOW FORMED. S5 

and tliat from among all the rest they were chosen by 
tlie Holy Ghost to be conjoined with the apostles in 
writing the sacred books of the New Testament. 

But, moreover (and let this be specially noticed), the 
prophetical authority of St Mark and St Luke is far 
from resting solely on these inductions. It rests on the 
testimony even of the apostles of Jesus Christ. It 
ought not to be forgotten, that it was under the long 
protracted government of those men of God, that the 
divine canon of the Scriptures of the New Testament 
was collected and transmitted to all the Churches. By 
a remarkable dispensation of God's providence, the 
lives of the greater number of the apostles w^ere pro- 
longed to a great many years. St Peter and St Paul 
lived to edify the Church of God for above thirty -four 
years after the resurrection of their Master ; nay, St 
John continued his ministry, in the province of Asia, 
in the centre of the Roman empire, for more than thirty 
years longer, after their death. The book of the Acts, 
which Avas written by St Luke subsequently to his 
Gospel,-^ had been already diffused through the Church 
a long while (I mean to say, for ten years at least) be- 
fore the martyrdom of St Paul. But St Paul, even 
long before going to Rome, had already diffused the 
gospel abundantly from Jerusalem as far as Illyricum.^ 
The apostles maintained a constant correspondence 
with the Christians of all countries ; they were daily 
called to meet the cares they had to sustain with re- 
spect to all the Churches.^ St Peter, in his second 
letter, addressed to the catholicity of God's Churches, 
spoke to them even then of all the epistles ot 
St Paul as incorporated wnth the Old Testament. 
And for more than half a century, all the Christian 
Churches were formed and conducted under the super- 
intendence of these men of God. It was, accordingly, 
with the assent, and under the prophetic government, 
of these apostles, called as they were to bind and to 

» Acts i. 1. 8 Rom. xv. 19. 8 2 Cor. xi. 28. 



loose, and to become, next to Christ, the twelve foun- 
dations of the universal Church, that the canon of the 
Scriptures was formed, and that the new people of 
God received its lively oracles, to transmit them to us.^ 
And it is thus that the Gospel of Luke, that of Mark, 
and the book of Acts, have been received by common 
consent, on the same authoritative grounds, and with the 
same submission as the apostolical books of Matthew, 
of Paul, of Peter, and John. These books, then, have 
the same authority for us as all the rest ; and we are 
called upon to receive them equally, " not as the word 
of men, but as it is in truth the word of God, which 
w^orketh effectually in all that believe."^ 

TVe venture to believe that these reflections will suf- 
fice for enabling the reader to comprehend how little 
ground there is for the distinction which Michaelis,' 
and some other German doctors, have made bold to 
establish with respect to inspiration, between the two 
evangelists and the other writers of the New Testament. 
It even appears to us, that it was in order to obviate 
any such supposition that Luke took care to place at 
the head of his gospel the four verses that serve as a 
preface to it. You see, in fact, that his object there is 
to contrast the certainty and divinity of his OAvn account 
with the uncertainty and the human character of those 
narrations, which many ('roXXoi) had taken in hand to 
set forth {s'myji^Yiffav dvarcc^ao'^a/) on the facts con- 
nected with the gospel— facts, he adds, most surely 
believed among us, tliat is to say, among the apostles 
and prophets of the New Testament [rojv rrs-Xri^oiosr)- 
fi'svMv sv r,ijj7v cr^a^/xaT-wv, the word in the original sig- 
nifying the highest degree of certainty, as may be 
seen, Rom. iv. 21 ; xiv. 5; 2 Tim. iv. 5, 17.) And 
therefore, adds St Luke, it seemed good to me also, 
having had perfect understanding of all things* fuo.m 
ABOVE, to tcrite qt' them unto thee iii order. 

» Acts vii. 3R ; Rom. iii. 2. » 1 Thes. ii. 13. 

8 Iiitiod., vol. i. pp. 11-J-1J9, English ed. 

■» Tlx(y)xokev8ti'cm. — Tlius Deuiosthciies lie Corona, i. 5!'^ !!«{»• 



GOSPELS OF MARK AND LUKE CANONICAL. 87 

St Luke had obtained this knowledge from above; 
that is to say, by the wisdom which comes from above, 
" and which had been given him." It is very true 
that the meaning ordinarily attached to this last ex- 
pression, in this passage, is from the very firsts as if 
instead of the word avoihv {from ahove)^ there were 
here the same -words ccx a^yjig {from the commence- 
ineni), which we find in verse second. But it appears 
to us that the opinion of Erasmus, of Gomar, of Henry, 
of Lightfoot, and other commentators, ought to be pre- 
ferred as more natural, and that we must take the 
word clvudsv here in the sense in which St John and 
St James have used it, when they say: " Every perfect 
gift Cometh from above (James i. 3 7) — " Thou couldst 
have no power against me, except it w^ere given thee 
from above" (John xix. 11) — " Except a man be born 
from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God " (John 
iii. 3) — " The wisdom that cometh fro?n above is first 
pure." — (James iii. 15, 17.) 

The prophet Luke, then, " had obtained from above a 
perfect understanding of all things that Jesus began both 
to do and teach, until the day in which he was taken up." 

Meanwhile, whatever translation one may prefer 
giving to these words, it is by other arguments that we 
have shown how Luke and Mark were prophets, and 
how their writings, transmitted to the Church by the 
authority of the apostles, are incorporated with those 
of the apostles, as well as with all the other books of 
the everlasting Word of God. 

Such, then, is the extent to which our argument has 
conducted us, and this is, we have had to acknowledge, on 
the very authority of Holy Scripture. It is, first of all, 
that the inspiration of the w^ords of the prophets was 
entire ; that the Holy Ghost spake by them, and that 
the Word of the Lord was upon their tongue. It is, 

KsXovdijxtis To7s fr^uy,ua,e-iv a* a,^x^!. Theophrast., Char. Proem, i : 
2ey li vit,^ix,y.oMvByi(ra.t not,) tlintroci, ii o^dus xiytu, — Josephus, in the first linea 
oi his book against Apion, opposes this same word ^oc^xxoXovd'^xoret 
{diliyenter assecutian) to rS vvvOwoy-ivu (sciscitauli ah aliis). 



88 INSPIRATION DID NOT IMPLY ECSTASY. 

next, that whatever was written in the Bible, having 
been so written by prophecy, all the sacred books are 
holy letters (hpoc y^a/x^aa^a), written prophecies {'ttoo- 
TTTiriiai y^oLZTiC,)^ and Scriptures given hp divine inspira- 
tion (y^apai dso'Trvivffroi.) Every thing there is from 
God. 

Nevertheless, the reader will be pleased to remember 
(we once more repeat it here, although we have had 
occasion more than once to say it already) that it does 
not necessarily follow that the prophets of the Old and 
New Testament were thrown into a state of excitation 
and enthusiasm, w^hich took them out of themselves; 
we must, on the contrary, beware of entertaining any 
such idea. The ancient Church attached so much im- 
portance even to this principle, that under the reign of 
the emperor Commodus, according to what Eusebius 
says, Miltiades (the illustrious author of a Christian 
Apology) " composed a book for the express purpose of 
establishing," against Montanus and the false prophets 
of Phrygia, " that true prophets ought to he masters of 
themselves^ and ought not to speak in ecstasy.'' ^ The ac- 
tion of God was exerted upon them without their pass- 
ing entirely out of their ordinary condition. " The 
spirits of the prophets," says St Paul, " are subject to 
the prophets." ^ Their intellectual faculties were at the 
time directed, not suspended. They knew, they felt, 
they sMlled, they recollected, they understood, they 
approved. They could say, " It seemed good to nie 
to write;" and, as apostles, "It seemed good to the 
Holy Ghost and to us."^ And the words as well as 
the thoughts were given them ; for, after all, words are 
themselves but second thoughts relating to language, 
and having recourse to it for the selection of expres 



' Hist. Eccles., lib. v. C I?. — "Ey » kroilU^vrt in(i T»y /IMjlfr* Fl;*- 

9Y,rr,), iv ixcrufftt x«A6~».— See \V.so Nicep'i , lib. iv. c. 24. See iLe -..ii.e 
principles in Tertullian (against Marci«ni, lib. iv.o. ClM -. in E))iph;in. 
(Adv. haereses, lib. ii. basrcs., 4H, c. 5); in .Toronie ^^ProeIuiam in 
Nuhum.); in Bftsil the Great (Commentar. in Flsaiain, ]^rocin. 5). 
* 1 Cor. xiv. 32. * Luke i. 3: Acts xv. 2t>. 



EXAMPLES OF THE APOSTLES. 89 

sions. In both cases, to explain the gift is equally easy 
and equally difficult. 

Meanwhile, as respects inspiration, there is something 
in holy Scripture that strikes us if possible still more 
than all those declarations of the apostles and of Jesus 
Christ himself, and that is the examples they present to 

us. 4 



SECTION V. 

THE EXAMPLES OP THE APOSTLES AND OF THEIR MASTER ATTEST 
THAT, IN THEIR VIEW, ALL THE WORDS OP THE HOLY BOOKS 
ARE GIVEN BY GOD. 

First of all, consider what use is made by the apostles 
themselves of the Word of God, and the terms in which 
they quote it. See how, in doing this, they not only 
think it enough to say, '' God hath said;"^ " the Holy 
Ghost saith;"^ " God saith in such a prophet;"^ but 
observe, farther, when they quote it, with what respect 
they speak of what are for them its smallest particles ; 
how attentively they weigh every word; with Avhat a 
religious assurance they often insist on a single word, 
in order to deduce from it the most serious conse- 
quences, and the most fundamental doctrines. 

For ourselves, we confess nothing more strongly im- 
presses us than this view of the subject; nothing has 
begot in us so deep and firm a confidence in the entire 
inspiration of the Scriptures. 

The preceding reasonings and testimonies seem of 
themselves sufficient to carry conviction to every atten- 
tive mind ; but if we felt conscious of any need on our 
own part of having our belief of this truth fortified, we 
feel that we should not go so far in search of reasons. 
It would be enough for us to inquire what holy Scrip- 

1 Eph. iv. 8; Heb. i. 8. 

a Acta xiii. 2, xxviii. 25; Heb, iii. 7, x. 15, and elsewhere. 

3 Rom. ix. 25. 



90 EXAMPLE OF ST PAUL. 

ture was in the view of God's apostles, and how far, 
according to their apprehension, its language was in- 
spired. What, for example, were St Paul's sentiments 
on the subject? For we make no pretension to be 
more enlightened divines than the twelve apostles. 
Cleaving to the dogmatical theology of St Peter and 
the exegetical of St Paul, among all the systems ever 
broached on the inspiration of the Scriptures, theirs is 
what Ave have decidedly resolved to prefer. 

Hear, then, the apostle Paul when he quotes them, 
and proceeds to comment upon them. On such occa- 
sions he discusses their minutest expressions ; and often, 
when about to deduce the most important consequences 
from them, he employs arguments which, were it we 
that should employ them in discussions with the doctors 
of the Socinian school, would be treated as childish or 
absurd. For such a respect for the words of the text, 
we should be sent back to the sixteenth century with 
its gross orthodoxy and its superannuated theology. 
Mark with what reverence the apostle dwells upon 
their most minute expressions ; with what confidence 
he expects the submission of the Church, while he notes 
the use of such a word rather than of such another ; 
with what studiousness and affection he as it were 
presses every one of them in his hands till the last drop 
of meaning lias been obtained from it. 

Among so many examples which we might adduce, 
let us confine ourselves, for brevity's sake, to the 
Epistle to the Hebrews. 

See how, at verse 8tli of chapter ii., after quoting 
these words, " Thou hast put all things under liis feet," the 
sacred author argues from the authority of the word aU. 

See how, at the lltli verse, in quoting the 22d Psalm, 
he argues from the expression my brethren^ that the 
Son of God behoved to put on the nature of man. 

See how, at the 27th verse of chapter xii., in quoting 
the prophet II;iggai, he argues from the word once more, 
" Yet once more." 

See at the 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and Oth verses, how 



ST PAUL HELD ALL SCRIPTURE INSPIRED. 91 

largely he argues from these words my son, of the Sd 
chapter of the Proverhs, " My son, despise not thou 
the chastening of the Lord." 

See how, at the 10th chapter, in quotinf>- the 40th 
Psahn, he argues from the words Lo I come, set against 
the words, " Thou wouldest not." 

See how, at chapter viii., from the 8th to the 13th 
verses, in quoting Jeremiah xxxi. 31, he argues from 
the word neu\ 

See, at chapter iii. 7-19, and iv. 2-11, with ur- 
gency in quoting the 95th Psalm, he argues from the 
word " to-day" fi-om the words " / have sicorn" and, 
above all, from the Avords " my rest,'' illustrated by that 
other expression of Genesis, " And God rested on the 
seventh day." 

See how, at chapter iii. 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. he argues 
f-oni tli'se words servant and my housf^^ taken from the 
book of Numbers, " My servant Moses, who is faithful 
in all ray house." 

See, especially at chapter vii., the use he makes suc- 
cessively of all the words of the 110th Psalm; mark 
how he takes up each of its expressions, one after an- 
other, in order to deduce from them the very highest 
doctrines : '' The Lord hath sworn ;" " he hath sworn 
by himself;" Thou art a priest;" " Thou art a priest 
for ever ;" " Thou art a priest after the order of Mel- 
chisedec ;" " of Melchisedec king of Sedec," and " of 
Melchisedec king of Salem." The exposition of the 
doctrines contained in each of these words will be found 
to occupy three chapters, the 5th, the 6th, and the 7th. 

But here I pause. Can we fail to conclude from 
such examples, that, in the view of the apostle Paul, 
the Scriptures were inspired by God, even to their most 
minute expressions ? Let each of us, then, place him- 
self in the school of the man to whom had been given, 
by the Spirit of God, the knowledge of the mystery of 
Christ, as to a holy apostle and prophet.^ One must 

J Q " Eph. iii. 4, 5. 



92 EXAMPLE OF JESUS CHRIST. 



necessarily either account him an enthusiast, and reject 
in his person the testimonies of the Holy Bible, or re- 
ceive with him the precious and fruitful doctrine of ihe 
plenary inspiration of the Scriptures. 

ye Avho read these lines, to what school -will ye at- 
tach yourselves ? to that of the apostles, or to that of 
the doctors of this age ? " If any man take away from 
the words of this hook " (this I testify, says St John), 
" God shall take away his part out of the Book of Life, 
and out of the holy city, and from the things which are 
written in this Book." ^ 

But, farther, let us turn from the apostles, prophets 
as they are — men sent by God for the establishment of 
his kingdom, the pillars of the Church, the mouths of 
the Holy Ghost, ambassadors of Jesus Christ ; let us, 
for an instant, turn from them as men who had not yet 
quite thrown otf their Jewish traditions and clownish 
prejudices, and let us go to the Master. Let us inquire 
of him what the Scriptures were in his view of them. 
Here is the grand question. The testimonies to which 
we have appealed are peremptory, no doubt ; and the 
doctrine of a plenary and entire inspiration is taught as 
clearly in Scripture as that of the resurrection of the 
dead can be ; that ought of itself to be enough for us ; 
but we repeat, nevertheless, here is an argument which 
for us renders all else superfluous. How did Jtsus 
Christ appeal to the Holy Bible ? What were his views 
of the letter of the Scriptures ? What use did he make 
of it, he who is its object and inspirer, ])eginning and 
end, first and last? he whose Holy Spirit, says St 
Peter, animated all the prophets of the Old Testament 
(2 Peter i. 21), who was in heaven in the bosom of the 
Father at the same time that he was seen here below, 
dwelling among us and preaching the gospel to the 
poor? Among the most ardent defenders of their ver- 
bal inspiration, we know^ not one that ever expressed 
himself with more respect for the altogether divine au- 

• Rev. xxii. 18. 19 



HOW DOES HE QUOTE THE SCRIPTURES? 03 

thority and everlasting endurance of their most minute 
expressions than was done by the man Jesus. And we 
scruple not to say, that were any modern writer to 
quote the Bible, as Jesus Christ did, with the view of 
deducing from it any doctrine, he would forthwith have 
to be ranked among the most zealous partisans of the 
doctrine we defend. I am asked. What is your view 
of the Holy Letters ? I answer, AVhat thought my 
Master of them ? how did he appeal to them ? what use 
did he make of them ? what were their smallest details 
in his eyes ? 

Ah ! speak to them thyself, Eternal Wisdom, Un- 
created Word, Judge of judges ! and as we proceed to 
repeat to them here the declarations of thy mouth, 
show them the majesty in which the Scriptures appeared 
to thee — show them the perfection thou didst recognise 
in them, that everlasting endurance, above all, which 
thou didst assign to their smallest iota, and which will 
make them outlast the universe, after the very heavens 
and the earth have passed away ! 

We are not afraid to say it : when we hear the Son 
of God quote the Scriptures^ every thing is said, in our 
view, on their divine inspiration — we need no farther 
testimony. All the declarations of the Bible are, no 
doubt, equally divine ; but this example of the Saviour 
of the world has settled the question for us at once. 
This proof requires neither long nor learned researclies ; 
it is grasped by 'the hand of a child as powerfully as by 
that of a doctor. Should any doubt, then, assail your 
soul, let it turn to the Lord of lords ; let it behold him 
in presence of the Scriptures ! 

Follow Jesus in the days of his flesh. With what 
serious and tender respect does he constantly hold in 
his hands " the volume of the Book," to quote every 
part of it, and note its shortest verses. See how one 
word, one single word, whether of a psalm or of an 
historical book, has for him the authority of a law. 
Mark with what confident submission he receives the 
whole Scriptures, without ever contesting its sacred 



94 RATIONALIST INFATUATION. 

canon ; for he knows that " salvation cometh of the 
Jews," and that, under the infallible providence of God, 
" to them were committed the oracles of God." Did I 
say, he receives them ? From his childhood to the 
grave, and from his rising again from the grave to his 
disappearance in the clouds, what does he bear always 
about with him, in the desert, in the temple, in the 
synagogue? What does he continue to quote with his 
resuscitated voice, just as the heavens are about to ex- 
claim, " Lift up your heads, ye everlasting doors, and 
the king of glory shall come in ?" It is the Bible, ever 
the Bible ; it is Moses, the Psalms, and the prophets : 
he quotes them, he explains them, but how ? Why, 
verse by verse, and word by word. 

In what alarming and melancholy contrast, after be- 
holding all this, do we see those misguided men present 
themselves in our days, who dare to judge, contradict, 
cull, and mutilate the Scriptures. AVho does not tremble, 
after following with his eyes the Son of Man as he 
commands the elements, stills the storms, and opens 
the graves, while, filled with so profound a respect for 
the sacred volume, he declares that he is one day to 
judge by that book the quick and the dead ? Who does 
not shudder, whose heart does not bleed, when, after 
observing this, we venture to step into a Rationalist 
academy, and see the professor's chair occupied by a 
poor mortal, learned, miserable, a sinner, responsible, 
yet handling God's AVord irreverently; when we follow 
him as he goes through this deplorable task before a 
body of youths, destined to be the guides of a whole 
people — youths capable of doing so much good if 
guided to the heights of the faith, and so much mischief 
if tutored in disrespect for those Scriptures which they 
are one day to preach? With what peremptory deci- 
sion do such men display the phantasmagoria of their 
hypotheses; they retrench, they add, they praise, they 
blame, and pity the simplicity which, reading the Bible 
as it was read by Jesus Christ, like liim clings to 
every syllable, and never dreams of finding error in the 



RASH MEN UNWITTINGLY BLASPHEME. 95 

Word of God ! Tliey pronounce on the intercalations 
and retrenchments that Holy Scripture must have 
undergone — intercalations and retrenchments never 
suspected hy Jesus Christ; they lop off the chapters 
they do not understand, and point out blunders, ill-sus- 
tained or ill-concluded reasonings, prejudices, impru- 
dences, and instances of vulgar ignorance. 

May God forgive my being compelled to put this 
frightful dilemma into words, but the alternative is in- 
evitable ! Either Jesus Christ exaggerated and spoke 
incoherently when he quoted the Scriptures thus, or 
these rash wretched men unwittingly blaspheme their 
divine majesty. It pains us to write these lines. God 
is our witness that we could have wished to recall, and 
then to efface them ; but we venture to say, with pro- 
found feeling, that it is in obedience, it is in charity, 
that they have been penned. Alas ! in a few short 
years both the doctors and the disciples will be laid in 
the tomb, they shall wither like the grass ; but not one 
jot or tittle of that divine book will then have passed 
away; and as certainly as the Bible is the truth, and 
that it has changed the face of the world, as certainly 
shall we see the Son come in the clouds of heaven, and 
judge, by his eternal Word, the secret thoughts of all 
men ! ^ . . . "All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man 
as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower 
thereof falleth away: but the word of the Lord endureth 
for ever. And this is the -word which by the gospel is 
preached unto you;"^ this is the w^ord which will judge us. 

Now, then, w^e proceed to close our proofs, by review- 
ing, under this aspect, the ministry of Jesus Christ. 
Let us follow him from the age of twelve to his descent 
into the grave, or rather, to Lis passing into the cloud, 
in which he went out of sight; and throughout the whole 
course of that incomparable career, let us see what the 
Scriptures were in the eye of Him who "upholds all 
things by the word of his power." 

1 Roru. ii. 16; John xii. 48; Matt. xxv. 31. « 1 Pet. i. 24, 25. 



96 Christ's example in the wilderness. 



First of all, let us contemplate him at the age of 
twelve years. He grew, like one of the children of 
men, in wisdom and in stature; lie is in the midst of 
the doctors in the temple of Jerusalem ; he ravishes 
with his answers those who hear him ; for, said thej, 
"he knows the Scriptures without having studied 
them."^ 

Behold him from the time he commenced his ministry. 
See him filled with the Holy Ghost ; he is led into the 
wilderness, there to sustain, as the first Adam did in 
Eden, a mysterious contest with the powers of dark- 
ness. The impure spirit dares to approach him, bent 
on his overthrow; but how will the Son of God repel 
him, even he who had come to destroy the works of the 
Devil ? Solely with the Bible. His only w^eapon, three 
successive times, in his divine hands, is the sword of the 
Spirit, the Bible. He quotes, thrice successively, the 
Book of Deuteronomy.^ On every fresh temptation, 
he, the Word made flesh, defends himself by a sentence 
of the oracles of God, and by a sentence, too, the whole 
force of which lies in the use of a single word, or of two 
words; first of these words (a^rw j^ovoj), bread alone; 
then of those words, " Thou shalt not tempt the Lord 
{o\)>, UTsiPuffsig Kv^iov);" then, finally, of these two 
words (dshv '7r^o(S7iuv7]6iic,)^ Thou shalt worship God. 

What an example for us! His w^hole reply, his whole 
defence is this: — "It is written;" "Get thee behind 
me, Satan, for it is written ;" and as soon as this ter- 
rible and mysterious contest closed, the angels drew 
I v-.r to minister to him. 

But, mark this fiirther, such w^as the respect of the 
Son of man for the authority of every word of the 
Scriptures, that the impure spirit hims(>lf, powerful as 
he was in evil, and who knew what all the words of the 
Bible were in his antagonist's eyes, could fancy no 
surer means of shaking his will than by quoting to him 
(but at the same time mutilating) a verse of the 91st 

» John vii. 15. * Deut. viii. 3, vi. 13, x. '20; Mutt. iv. 1-11. 



OUR SATTOUR AT NAZARETH. 97 

psalm ; and forthwith Jesus Christ, to confound him, 
thinks it is enough to reply once more with, " It is 
written." 

*See how his priestly ministry commenced — w^ith the 
use of the Scriptures ; and see how his prophetic min- 
istry commenced soon after — with the use of the Scrip- 
tures. 

Once engaged in his work, let us follow him as he 
goes from place to place doing good, displaying in his 
poverty his creative power ever for the relief of others, 
never for his own. He speaks, and it is done ; he casts 
out devils, he turns the storm into a calm, he raises the 
dead. Yet, amid all these tokens of greatness, observe 
what the Scriptures are to him. The Word is ever with 
him ; not in his hands, for he knows it thoroughly, hut 
in his memory and in his incomparable heart. Mark 
how he speaks of it ! When he unrols the sacred vo- 
lume, it is as if an opening were made in heaven, that 
we may hear Jehovah's voice. With what reverence, 
with what submission, does he expound the Scriptures, 
comment upon them, quote them word by word ! See 
how it becomes his grand concern to heal men's dis- 
eases and to preach the Scriptures, as it was afterwards 
to die and to iulfil the Scriptures ! 

See who comes, " as his custom was," into the syna- 
gogue on the Sabbath-day; for we are told he taught 
in their synagogues.^ He goes into that at Nazareth ; 
and what do we find him doing there — he, the ever- 
lasting Wisdom, possessed by Jehovah in the beginning 
of his way, brought forth when there were no depths, 
before the mountains were settled, and before the hills V 
He rises and takes the Bible, opens it at Isaiah, reads 
some words there; then having closed the book, he sits 
down, and while the eyes of all that are in the syna- 
gogue are fastened on him, he begins to say, '' This day 
is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears."^ 

See him as he passes through Galilee, and mark how 

J Luke iv. 15, 16. « Prov. viii. 22, 25. a Luke iv. 21. 



98 OFR SAVIOUR BEFORE THE SADDUCT^ES. 

he employs himself there.^ " The volume of the book" 
is still in his hands; he explains it line by line, word 
by word ; he points out to our respect its most minute 
expressions, as he would those of "the ten words" 
uttered on Sinai. 

See him once more in Jerusalem, before the pool of 
Bethesda; what do we find him saying to the people? 
" Search the Scriptures." — (John v.' 39.) 

See him in the holy place, in the midst of which he 
had dared to say aloud, " In this place is one greater 
than the holy place." — (Matt. xii. 6.) Follow him into 
the presence of the Sadducees and the Pharisees, while 
he reprehends them successively with these words, " It 
is written," as he had done in the case of Satan. 

Listen to his reply to the Sadducees who denied the 
resurrection of the body. How does he refute them ? 
By ONE SOLE WORD of an HISTORICAL passagc of the 
Bible ; by a single verb in the present tense, instead of 
that same verb in the past tense. " Ye greatly err," 
said he to them, " not knowing the Scriptures. Have 
ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, 
saying, I am the God of Abraham ! " It is thus that he 
proves to them the doctrine of the resurrection. God, 
on Mount Sinai, four hundred years after the death 
of Abraham, says to Moses, not " I was" but ''I a?n" 
the God of Abraham; I am that now (:=r-:s t'-s "::s), 
which the Holy Ghost translates — {'Eyui siai 6 Qihg 
' A/S^acc/x). There is a resurrection, then ; for God is not 
the God of a few handfuls of dust, the God of the dead, 
the God of nothing : he is the God of the living. Those 
men therefore are, in the view of God. still ahve.^ 

Next, behold him in the presence of the Pharisees. 
It is again by the letter of the AVord that he proceeds 
to confound them. 

Some had by this time followed him into the coasts 
of Judea beyond Jordan, and came to him asking to be 
informed wluit were his doctrines on the subject of 

» Matt. xxii. 31, 32. 



OUR SAVIOUR BEFORE THE PHARISEES. 99 

marriage and divorce. Xow, what foUcsved on the part 
of Jesus Christ ? He might certainly have given an 
authoritative reply, and announced his own laws on the 
subject. Is he not himself the King of kings and Lord 
of lords ? But no ; it was to the I3ible that he made 
his appeal, still for the same purpose of making it the 
basis of doctrine ; it was to these simple words taken 
from a purely historical passage in Genesis/ — " Hate 
YE NOT READ, that he which made them at the beginning 
made them male and female ; so that they twain shall 
be one flesh ? TV"hat therefore God hath joined to- 
gether, let not man put asunder." ' 

But listen to him, especially when in the temple he 
would prove to other Pharisees, by the Scriptures, the 
divinity of the expected Messiah. Here likewise, to 
demonstrate this, he still insists on the use of a single 
WORD, which he proceeds to take from the Book of 
Psalms : *' If the Messiah be the son of David," said 
he, " how doth Da^dd, by the Spirit, call him Lord ; 
saying (at the 110th Psalm), The Lord said unto my 
Lord. Sit thou on my right hand ? If David then call 
him Lord, how is he his son ? " 

How happens it, that among those Pharisees none 
was found to say in reply, "What ! do you mean to in- 
sist on a single word, and still more on a term bor- 
rowed from a poesy eminently lyrical, where the royal 
Psalmist might, without material consequence, have 
employed too lively a construction, high-flown expres- 
sions, and words which, doubtless, he had not theolo- 
gically pondered before thro%ving rhem into his verses ? 
"Would you follow such a mode of minutely interpreting 
each expressioa as is at once fanatical and servile? 
Would yon worship the letter of the Scriptures to such 
an extreme ? Would you build a whole doctrine upon 
a word ? " 

Yes, I do, is Christ's reply ; yes, I will throw myself 
on a single word, because that word is God's I And, 

» Gen. L 27, ii. 24. « Matt. xix. 4, 5, 6. 



100 OUR SAVIOUR ON THE CROSS. 

to cut short all yoar objections, I tell you that it is by 
THE Spirit that David wrote all the words of his 
hymns ; and I ask you "• how, if the ]\Iessiah be his 
son, David, by the Spirit, can call him his Lord, when 
he says. The Lord said unto my Lord ? " 

Students of God's Word, and you especially who are 
to be his ministers, and who, as your preparation for 
preachhig it, would desire first of all to have received 
it into a good and honest heart, behold what every 
saying, every single word of the Book of God, was in 
the regard of your Master. Go and do likewise ! 

But more than this. Again let us listen to him, 
even on tbe cross. There he poured out his soul as an 
offering for sin ; all his bones were out of joint ; he 
was poured out as water ; his heart was like wax, 
melted in the midst of his bowels ; his tongue cleaved 
to his jaws ; he was about to give up his spirit to his 
Father. But, previous to this, what do we find him 
do? He desires to collect his remaining strength, in 
order to recite a psalm which the Church of Israel had 
sung on her religious festivals for a thousand years, 
and which told over, one after another, all his sorrows 
and all his prayers : " Eli^ Eli, lama sahachthani (my 
God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me) ?" He does 
even more than this : listen to him. There remained 
in the Scriptures one word which had not yet been ful- 
filled. Vinegar had still to be given him on that cross 
(this the Holy Ghost had declared a thousand years 
before in the 69th Psalm). " After this," it is written, 
" Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, 
that the Scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst. 
When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he 
said, It is finished : and having bowed his head, ho 
gave up the ghost." ^ 

When David sang the C9th Psahu on Shoshannim and 
the 22(1 Psalm on Aiji-leth, did he know the prophetic 
meaning of all these words, of those hands and feet 

1 John xix. 28-30. 



OUR SAVIOUR AFTER HIS RESURRECTION. 101 

that Avere pierced, of that gall poured out, of tliat vine- 
gar, of those garments that -were parted, of tliat vesture 
on -which a lot >Yas cast, of that mocking populace, 
■svagging their heads and making mouths? It matters 
little to us his understanding it; the Holy Ghost at 
least understood it, and David spake by tiii-: Spirit, 
said Jesus Christ. The heaven and the earth shall 
pass away; but there was not in that book a jot or 
tittle that could pass away till all was fulfilled. — (John x. 
35; INIatt. v. 18). 

Meanwhile, behold something, if possible, more strik- 
ing still. Jesus Christ rises from the tomb ; he has 
overcome death ; he is about to return to the Father, 
there to resume that glory which he had with the Father 
before the world began. Let us follow him, then, 
during those fleeting moments with which he would 
still favour the earth. What words are noAv about to 
proceed from that mouth, again restored to life ? Why, 
words from Holy Scripture. Still he quotes it, explains 
it, preaches it. See him, first of all, on the way to 
Emmaus, walking with Cleopas and his friend ; after- 
wards in the upper chamber ; and, later still, on the 
borders of the lake How is he employed ? In ex- 
pounding the sacred books; he begins with IMoses, he 
continues through all the Prophets and the Psalms; he 
shows them what had been said concerning him in all 
the Scriptures; he opens their minds to understand 
them ; he makes their hearts burn within them as he 
speaks of them.^ 

But we have not yet done. All these quotations 
show us what the Holy Bible was in the eyes of Him 
" in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and 
knowledge" (Col. ii. 3); and " by whom all things sub- 
sist" (Col. i. 17). But on the letter of the Scriptures, 
listen further to two declarations, and a last example 
of our Lord. 

" It is easier," says he, " for heaven and earth to 

» Luke xxiv. '47, 44, 32. 



1G2 OUK SAVIOIRS THEOLOGY. 

pass, than for one tittle (Ksoa/a) of the law to fall ;* 
and by the law Jesus Christ understood the Avhole of 
the Scriptures, and even, more particularly, the Book of 
Psalms.^ What terms could possibly be imagined capa- 
ble of expressing, with greater force and precision, the 
principle which we defend ; that is to say, the autho- 
rity, the entire divine inspiration, and the perpetuity of 
all the parts, and of the very letter of the Scriptures ? 
Ye who study God's Word, here behold the theology 
of your Master ! Be ye then divines after his manner ; 
be your Bible the same as that of the Son of God ! Of 
that not a single tittle can fall. 

" Till heaven and earth pass," saith he, " one jot or 
one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be 
fulfilled."— (Matt. V. 18.) All the words of theScriptur s, 
according-ly, even to the smallest stroke of a letter, are 
no less than the words of Jesus Christ ; for he hath 
also said, '^ Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my 
words shall not pass away." — (Luke xxi. 33.) 

The impugners of these doctrines ask us if we are 
bold enough to maintain that Holy Scripture is a law 
of God even in its words, as hyssop, or as an oak, is a 
work of God even in its leaves. We reply, with all the 
Fathers of the Church, Yes, even in its " words, even 
to (Joorcc £1/, '/I [xia xs^ata) one jot or one tittle!" 

But, passing from these two declarations, let us final- 
ly direct our attention to a last example given by our 
Lord which we have not yet adduced. 

It is still Jesus Christ who is about to quote the 
Scriptures, but claiming for their smallest words such 
an authority, that one is compelled to rank him among 
the most ardent partisans of verbal inspiration, and that 
we do not think, that had we before us all the writings 
of divines the most uncompromising in their orthodoxy, 
we should any where find an example of more profound 
respect for the letter of Scripture, and for the plenitude 
of their divine inspiration. 

» Luke xvi. 17. 

* John X, 31, as did also the Jews, xii. 34; Roui. iii. \B. 



HE ARGUES FROM A SINGLE WORD. 103 

It was winter. Jesus walked in the temple in Solo- 
mon's (the eastern) porch; the Jews came about him, 
upon which he said to them, "I give eternal life unto 
my sheep, and they shall never perish, neither shall any 
]>luck them out of my hand: T and the Father are 
one." People Avere astonished at such language; but 
he assumed a still bolder tone, until at last the Jew^s, 
exclaiming that it was blasphemy, took up stones to 
stone him, telling him they did so, " because thou, be- 
ing a man, makest thyself God."^ 

Now then, let the reader carefully mark the several 
points involved in the answer made by Jesus Christ. 
' le quotes a saying taken from one of the psalms, and 
proceeds to rest the whole of his doctrine on that single 
s ;ying : for " he made himself equal with God," says 
John elsewhere (v. 18). In maintaining the most 
sublime And most mysterious of his doctrines, and, in 
order to Icgitimitize the most extraordinary of his pre- 
tensions, he appeals to certain words in the 82d Psalm. 
But, mark well ! before pronouncing the words he takes 
care to interrupt himself; he pauses in a solemn paren- 
thesis, and exclaims in a tone of authority. And the 
Scripture cannot he broken (xa/ o\j dvmrai Xvdrjvcci i] 

Has sufficient attention been paid to this ? Not only 
is our Lord's argument here founded entirely on the 
use made by the Psalmist of a single word, and not 
only does he proceed to establish the most astonishing 
of his doctrines on this expression ; but further, in 
thus quoting the Book of Psalms in order to make us 
understand that in his eyes the whole book was dictated 
by the Holy Ghost, and that every word of it carried 
the authority of the law, Jesus calls it by the name of 
LAW, and says to the Jews, " Is it not written in your 
law, I have said ye are gods ?" These words are placed 
in the middle of a hymn ; they might seem to have 
escaped from the unreflecting fervour of the prophet 

» John X. 23, and following verses. 



104 OUR LORD UNDER SOLOMON'S PORCH, 

Asaph, or from the burning raptures of his poetrj. 
And were we not to admit the full inspiration of all 
that is written^ one might be tempted to tax them with 
indiscretion, since the imprudent use which the Psalmist 
may have made of them, might have led the people to 
usages elsewhere censured by the Word of God, and to 
idolatrous imaginations. How then, once more we ask, 
was there no rationalist scribe from the universities of 
Israel to be found there, under Solomon's porch, to 
say to him, " You cannot, Lord, claim the authority 
of that expression. The use that Asaph makes of it 
can have been neither considerate nor becoming Al- 
though inspired as respects the thoughts suggested by 
his piety, he no doubt did not maturely weigh every 
little word with a very scrupulous regard to the use 
that might possibly be made of them a thousand years 
after his own day. It were rash, therefore, to insist 
upon them." 

But now, let the reader mark, how our Lord antici- 
pates the profane rashness of such an objection. Ob- 
serve well : he solemnly reproves it ; he proceeds to 
pronounce words concerning himself which would be 
blasphemy in the mouth of an archangel. " I and the 
Father are one ;" but he interrupts himself, and imme- 
diately after saying, " Is it not written in your law, ye 
are gods?" he stops, and, fixing his eyes with a look 
of authority on the doctors who surround him, he 
exclc'ims, " And the Scripture cannot be broken !" 
As if he had said, " Beware ! there is not in the sacred 
books a single word to be found fault with, nor a single 
word that one can neglect. Tliis which I cite in this 
82d Psalm, has been traced by the hand that made the 
heavens." If, then, he has been willing to give the 
name of gods to men, in so far as they were christs 
(anointed ones), and types of the true Christ, who is 
emphatically the Anointed One, and taking care never- 
theless to call to mind "that they should die like 
men," how shall it not still more appertain to me 
to take that name to myself? I, "the everlasting 



THE SCRIPTURE CANNOT BE BROKEN. 105 

Father," Emmanuel, the God-man, \vho do the works 
of my Father, and on whom tlie Father hath put his 
seal ? ' 

Here, then, we ask of every serious reader (and our 
argument, be it well observed, is altogether independent 
of the orthodox meaning or the Socinian meaning 
people may choose to give to the w^ords of Jesus Christ) ; 
we ask. Is it possible to admit that the Being who 
makes such a use of the Scriptures does not believe in 

THEIR PLENARY VERBAL INSPIRATION ? And if he COuld 

have imagined that the words of the Bible were left to 
the free choice and pious fancies of the sacred writers, 
would he ever have dreamed of founding such argu- 
ments on such a word ? The Lord Jesus, our Saviour 
and our Judge, believed then in the most complete in- 
spiration of the Scriptures ; and for him the first rule of 
ail hermeneutics, and the commencement of all exegesis, 
was this simple maxim applied to the most minute ex- 
pressions of the written word, " And the Scripture 

CANNOT BE BROKEN." 

Let, then, the Prince of Life, the light of the world, 
reckon all of us as his scholars ! What he believed let 
us receive. AVhat he respected let us revere. Let us 
press to our sickly hearts that Word to which he sub- 
mitted his saviour heart, and all the thoughts of his 
holy humanity, and to it let us subject all the thoughts 
of our fallen humanity. There let us look for God, even 
in its minutest passages ; in it let us daily dip the roots 
of our being, " like the tree planted by the rivers of 
waters, which bringeth forth his fruit in his season, and 
his leaf shall not wither." 

1 Isa. Lx. 6, vii. 14; John vi. 27. 



106 DIDACTIC ABSTRACT. 



CHAPTER III. 

BRIEP DIDACTIC ABSTRACT OF THE DOCTRINE OF THE 
DIVINE INSPIRATION, 

It has been onr desire that this work should not hear so 
strictly theological a character, as that Christian women, 
or other persons not conversant with certain studies, and 
not acquainted with the sacred languages, should be de- 
terred from the perusal of it. Nevertheless, we should 
be wanting to part of our object if the doctrine were 
not, on some points, stated with more precision. VTe 
have to request, therefore, that in order to avoid being 
led off, under another form, into an excessive length of 
development, we may be allowed to exhibit it here in a 
more didactic shape, and to sum it up in a short cate- 
chetical sketch. We will do little more than indicate 
the proper place of the points already treated ; and will 
enter somewhat at large into the consideration of those 
only that have not yet been mentioned. 



SECTION I. 

CATEOHETIOAL SKETCH OF THE MAIN POINTS OF THE DOCTRINE. 

I. What, then, are we to understand by divine inspi- 
ration ? 

Divine inspiration is the mysterious power put forth 



DEGREES OF INSPIRATION AN IDLE CONJECTURE. 107 

by the Spirit of God on the authors of holy writ, to 
make them write it, to guide them even in the employ- 
ment of the words they use, and thus to preserve them 
from all error ? 

II. What are we told of the spiritual power put 
forth on the men of God while they were writing their 
sacred books ? 

"We are told that they were led or moved ((pi ^ojui^zvoi) "not 
by the will of man, but by the Holy Ghost ; so that 
they set forth the things of God, not in words which 
man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost 
teacheth." ^ " God," says the apostle,^ " spake by the 
PROPHETS at sundry times, and in divers manners (toXl/- 
/jispujg xai voXvr^oirug) ;" sometimes enabling them to 
understand what he made them say ; sometimes without 
doing so ; sometimes by dreams^ and by visions which 
he afterwards made them relate ; sometimes by giving 
them words internally (Xoyu) hvbtakru)')^ which he caused 
them immediately to utter ; sometimes by words trans- 
mitted to them externally {Xbyuj <7r^o(p6^i%(*))^ which he 
caused them to repeat.* 

III. But what passed in their hearts and minds while 
they were writing ? 

This we cannot tell. It is a fact which, subject be- 
sides to great varieties, could not be for us an object 
either of scientific inquiry or of faith. 

IV. Have not modern authors, however, who have 
written on this subject, often distinguished in the Scrip- 
tures three or four degrees of inspiration (superinten- 
dence, elevation, directio7i, suggestionY- 

This is but idle conjecture ; and the supposition, 

Ji 2 Peter i. 21 ; 1 Cor. ii. 13. a Heb. i. 1. 

3 Num. xii. 6; Job xxxiii. 15; Dan. i. 17, ii. 6, vii. 1; Gen. xx. 6, 
xxxi. 10 ; 1 Kings iii. 5; Matt. i. 20, ii. 12, 22; Acts ii. 17. 

■* Num. XTc. 6, xxiv. 4; Job vii. 14; Gen. xx. 3; Ps. Ixxxix. 19; 
Matt. xvii. 9; Acts ii. 17, ix. 10-12, x. 3, 17, 19, xi. 5, xii. 9, xvi. 
9, 10; 2 Cor. xii. 1, 2. 



108 baumgarten's definition. 

besides, is in contradiction with the Word of God, 
which knows but one kind of inspiration. Here, there 
is none true but suggestion. 

V. Do we not see, however, that the men of God 
were profoundly acquainted, and often even profoundly 
affected, with the sacred things which they taught, with 
the future things which they predicted, with the past 
things which they related ? 

No doubt they might be so — nay, in most instances 
they were so — but they might not have been so ; this 
happened in different measures, of which the degree 
remains to us unknown, and the knowledge of which 
is not required of us. 

VI. What then must we think of those definitions of 
divine inspiration, in which Scripture seems to be re- 
presented as the altogether human expression of a reve- 
lation altogether divine ; — what, for example, must we 
think of that of Baumgarten,^ who says, that inspiration 
is but the means by which revelation, at first immediate, 
became mediate, and took the form of a book {medium 
quo revelatio i?7imediata, mediata facta, inque libros re- 
lata est ?) 

These definitions are not exact, and may give rise to 
false notions of inspiration. I say they are not exact. 
They contradict facts. Immediate revelation does not 
necessarily precede inspiration ; and when it precedes 
it, it is not its measure. The empty air prophesied;' 
a hand coming forth from a wall wrote the words of 
God;^ a dumb animal reproved the madness of a pro- 
phet.* Balaam prophesied without any desire to do so; 
and the believers of Corinth did so without even 
knowing the meaning of the words put by the Holy 
Ghost on their lips."* 

» De Discrimine Reveliit. ot Inspirationis, 

2 Gen. iii. 14, &c., iv. 6; Exod. iii. 6, &c., xix. 3, &c.; Deut. iv. 
12; Matt. iii. 17, xvii. 5, 
« Daai. V. 5. ■* 2 Pct^'M. 16. a 1 Cor. xiv. 



INSPIRATION AND ILLUMINATION. 109 

I would next observe, that these definitions produce 
or conceal false notions of inspiration. In fact, they 
assume its being nothing more than the natural expres- 
sion of a supernatural revelation ; and that the men of 
God had merely of themselves, and in a human way, to 
put down in their books what the Holy Ghost made 
them see in a divine way, in their understandings. 
But inspiration is more than this. Scripture is not the 
mind of God elaborated by the understanding of man, 
to be promulgated in the words of man ; it is at once 
the mind of God and the word of God. 

YII. The Holy Ghost having in all ages illuminated 
God's elect, and having moreover distributed miraculous 
powers among them in ancient times, in which of these 
two orders of spiritual gifts ought we to rank inspira- 
tion ? 

"We must rank it among the extraordinary and wholly 
miraculous gifts. The Holy Ghost in all ages en- 
lightens the elect by his powerful inward virtue ; he 
testifies to them of Christ ;^ gives them the unction of 
the Holy One ; teaches them all things, and convinces 
them of all truth.^ But, besides these ordinrny gifts of 
illumination and faith, the same Spirit shed extraor- 
dinary ones on the men who were commissioned to 
promulgate and to write the oracles of God. Divine 
inspiration was one of those gifts. 

VIII. Is the difference, then, between illumination 
and inspiration a difference of kind or only of degree ? 

It is a difference of kind, and not of degree only. 

IX. Nevertheless, did not the apostles, besides in- 
spiration^ receive from the Holy Ghost illumination in 
extraordinary measure, and in its most eminent degree ? 

In its most eminent degree, is what none can affirm ; 
in an extraordinary degree, is what none can contradict. 

> John XV. 26. 

« 1 John ii. 20, 27; John xiv. 16-26; vii. 38, .''.9. 



110 INSPIRATION NOT ILLUMINATION. 

The apostle Paul, for example, did not receive the 
gospel from any man, but by a revelation from Jesus 
Christ.i 

He wrote " all his epistles," St Peter tells us,^ not 
only in words taught by the Holy Ghost,^ as had been 
the OTHER Scriptures (of the old Testament), but ac- 
cording to a wisdom which had been given to him.* 
He had the knowledge of the mystery of Christ.^ Jesus 
Christ had promised to give his disciples not only " a 
mouth, but wisdom to testify of him."^ David, when 
he seemed to speak only of himself in the Psalms, knew 
that it was of the Messiah that his words were to be 
understood : " Being a prophet, and knowing that of the 
fruit of his loins, according to the flesh, God would 
raise up Christ to sit on his throne."^ 

X. AVhy, then, should we not say that divine inspira- 
tion is but illumination in its most exalted and abun- 
dant measure ? 

We must beware of saying so ; for thus we should 
have but a narrow, confused, contingent, and constantly 
fluctuating idea of inspiration. In fact, — 

1. God, who often conjoined those two gifts in one 
man, often also saw fit to disjoin them, in order that he 
might give us to understand that they essentially differ, 
the one from the other, and that, when united, they are 
independent. Every true Christian has the Holy 
Ghosr,^ hut every Christian is not inspired, and such an 
one who utters the words ot" God, may not have received 
either life-giving affections or life-giving light. 

2. It may l)e demonstrated by a great many examples, 
that the one of these gifts was not the measure of the 
other; and tliat the divine inspiration of the prophets 
did not observe the ratio of their knowledge, any more 
than that of their holiness. 

» Ga.. i. 12, 16; 1 Cor. xv. 3. « 2 Pet. iii. 15. 16. 

8 1 Cor. ii. 13. *-2 Pet. iii. lo, 16. 

6 Eph.iii, 3. « Luke xxi. 15. 

7 Acts ii. 30. 

» 1 John ii. 20,27; Jer. xxii. 34; John vi. 45. 



INSPIRATION THE OBJECT OF FAITH. ] 1 1 

3. Far, indeed, from the one of those gifts being the 
measure of the other, one may even say that divine in- 
spiration appeared all the more strikingly the more 
that the illumination of the sacred writer remained in 
arrear oFhis illumination. When you behold the very 
prophets, who were most enlightened by God's Spirit, 
bending over their own pages after having written them, 
and endeavouring to comprehend the meaning which 
the Spirit in them had caused them to express, it should 
become manifest to you that their divine inspiration was 
independent of their illumination. 

4. Even supposing the prophet's illumination raised 
to its utmost pitch, still it did not reach the altitude of 
the divine idea, and there might be much more mean- 
ing in the word dictated to them than the prophet was yet 
cognisant of. David, doubtless, in hymning his psalms, 
knew^ that they referred to "Him who was to be born 
of his loins, to sit upon his throne for ever." Most of 
the prophets, like Abraham their father, saw the day 
of Christ, and when they saw it, were glad ; ^ they 
searched what the Spirit of Christ, which was in them, 
did signify, when it testified beforehand of the suffer- 
ings of the Messiah, and the glory that should follow.' 
Yet notwithstanding all this, our Lord attests to us 
that the simplest Christian, the least (in knowledge) 
in the kingdom of God, knows more on that subject 
than the greatest of the prophets.* 

5. These gifts differ from each other in essential cha- 
racters, which we will presently describe. 

6. Finally, it is always the inspiration of the book 
that is presented to us as an object of faith, never the 
inward state of him that writes it. His knowledge or 
ignorance nowise affects the confidence I owe to his 
words ; and my soul ought ever to look not so much to 
the lights of his understanding as to the God of all 

1 Acts ii. 30. 2 John viii. 56. s i pgter i. 1 1 . 

4 Mat, xi. 11. Michaelis Introd. tome i. p. 116-129, French 
translation. (That author thinks, that in this passage (he least 
means the least prophet.) 



112 INSPIRATION INTERMITTENT. 

holiness, who speaks to me by his mouth. The Saviour 
desired, it is true, that most of those who related his 
history should also have been witnesses of what they 
related. This was, no doubt, in order that the world 
might listen to them with the greater confidence, and 
might not start reasonable doubts as to the truth oi 
their narratives. But the Church, in her faith, looks 
much higher than this: to her the intelligence of the 
writers is imperfectly known, and a matter of compa- 
rative indifference — what she does know is their inspi- 
ration. It is never in the breast of the prophet that she 
goes to look for its source; it is in that of her God. 
" Christ speaks in me," says St Paul, '' and God hath 
spoken to our fathers in the prophets."^ • " ^"^hy look 
ye so earnestly on us," say to her all the sacred writers, 
" as though by our own power or holiness we had done 
this work? "^ Look upwards. 

XI. If there exist, then, between these two spiritual 
graces of illumination and inspiration a specific differ- 
ence, in what must we say that it consists ? 

Though you should find it impossible to say what 
that difference is, you would not the less be obliged by 
the preceding reasons to declare that it does exist. In 
order to be able fully to reply to this question, it were 
necessary that you should know the nature and the 
mode of both these gifts ; whereas the Holy Ghost has 
never explained to us, either how he infuses God's 
thoughts into the understanding of a believer, or how 
he puts God's words into the mouth of a prophet. 
Nevertheless, we can here point out two essential cha- 
racters by which these two operations of the Holy Ghost 
have always sho\ATi themselves to be distinct : the one 
of these characters relates to their duration, the other 
to their measure. 

In point of duration, illumination is continuous, 
whereas inspiration is intermittent. In point of mea- 

» 2 Cor. xiii. 3; Heb. i. 1 (i»). « Acts iii. 12. 



MIRACULOUS GIFTS INTERMITTENT. 113 

sure, illumination admits of degrees, whereas inspira- 
tion does not admit of them. 

XII. What are vre to understand by saying that illu- 
mination is continuous, and inspiration ii-terr^'ittent ? 

The illumination of a believer bj the Holy Ghost is 
a permanent -work. Having commenced for him on 
the day of his new birth, it goes on increasing, and 
attends him with its rays to the termination of his 
course. That light, no doubt, is but too much obscured 
by his acts of faithlessness and negligence, but never 
more will it leave him altogether. "His pa rh," says 
the wise man, "• is like the shining light, shining more 
and more unto the perfect day."-*^ " "When it pleased 
God, who separated me from my mother's womb, to 
reveal his Son in me,"^ he preserves to the end the 
knowledge of the mystery of Jesus Christ, and can at 
all times set forth its truths and its glories. As it was 
not jflesh and blood that had revealed these things to 
him, but the Father,^ that unction which he received 
from the Holy One * abides in him, says St John, and 
he needs not that any man teach him; but as the same 
anointing teacheth him of all things, and is truth, so, 
even as he hath been taught by it, he will remain in it. 
Illumination, therefore, abideth on the faithful ; but it 
is not so with miraculous gifts, nor with the divine in- 
spiration, which is one of those gifts. ^ 

As for miraculous gifts, they were always intermit- 
tent with the men of God, if we except the only man 
who " received not the Spirit by measure." * The 
apostle Paul, for example, who at one time restored 
Eutychus to life, and by whom God wrought such spe- 
cial miracles" (so as that it sufficed that handkerchiefs 
and aprons should touch his body and be laid upon the 
sick, in order to cures being effected) ; at other times 
could not relieve either his colleague Trophimus or his 

1 Prov. It. 18. » Gal. i. 15. 3 ^latt. xvi. 17. 

« IJohn ii. 20; 27. « 1 Cor. xiv. 1 ; Acts xix. 6. 

« John iii. 34. 7 Acts xix. 11, 1-2. 



114 INSPIRATION CAME BY INTERVALS. 

beloved Epaphroditus, or his son Timothy.^ It is the 
same with inspiration, which is only the most excellent 
of miraculous gifts. In the Lord's prophets, it was ex- 
erted only by intervals. The prophets, and even the 
apostles, who (as we shall show) were prophets, and 
more than prophets,^ did not prophesy as often as they 
pleased. Inspiration was sent to them by intervals ; it 
came upon them according as the Holy Ghost saw fit 
to give it to them (xa^o^g ro Ylvsj/xoc sdibov a\jroTg dcrop- 
QsyyiG&ai);^ for " never did prophecy come by the will 
of man," says St Peter ;* " but holy men of (xod spake 
as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." God spake 
in the prophets {sv roTg "T^o^^jra/g), says St Paul, when 
he wished to do so, at sundry times ('rroXv/xsoug), as 
well as in divers manners (croXur^oVaij). On such a day, 
and at such a time, it is often written, '' the word of 
Jehovah was upon such a man {'.-ha rr.n — ^2-; •^rr:)." " In 
the tenth year, on the twelfth day of the tenth month, 
the word of Jehovah came to me," said the prophet." 
In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius, the word 
of the Lord came unto John, the son of Zacharias (sys- 
vsTo ^TJfjbcc 0SOU s-ttI 'loodvvi^v);^ and on the eighth day, 
Zacharias, his father, was filled with the Holy Ghost, 
and prophesied, saying, . . . J 

So then we ouGfht not to imajjine that the divine in- 
fallibility of the language of the prophets (and even of 
the apostles), lasted longer than the times in which they 

were en<ra2:ed in their miraculous task, and in which 

00 .... 

the Spirit caused them to speak. "Without divine in- 
spiration, they were in most instances enlightened, 
sanctified, and preserved by God, as holy and faithful 
men in our own days may still be ; bu^ then they no 
more spoke as moved by the Holy Ghost ; — " their lan- 
guage might still be worthy of the most respectful at- 

» 2 Tim. iv. 20; Philip, ii. 27; 1 Tim. v. 23. 

8 Eph. iii. 4,5, iv. 11; Rom. xvi. 25-27. 

BActaii. 4. * 2 Peter i. 21. 

» Ezek. xxix. 1, nnd elsewhere. ^ Luke iii. 1, 2. 

7 Luke i. 59, G7, 41,42. 



PROPHETS FALLIBLE WHEN UNINSPIRED. 115 

tention ; but it was a holy man that spoke ; it was no 
longer God : they again became fallible." 

XIII. Can any examples be adduced of this falhbility 
being attached to their language, when unaccompanied 
with Divine inspiration ? 

A multitude of instances occur. Men are often, after 
having been for a time the mouth of the Lord, seen to 
become false prophets, and mendaciously to pretend to 
utter the words of Jehovah, after the Spirit had ceased 
to speak in them ; " although the Lord sent them not, 
neither commanded them, neither spake unto them." 
" They speak a vision of their own heart, not out of 
the mouth of the Lord." ^ 

But without referring to those wicked men, or to the 
profane Saul, or to Balaam, who were for some time 
numbered among the prophets, shall it be thought that 
all the words of king David were infallible during the 
course of that long year which he passed in adultery? 
Yet " these," saith the Scripture, " be the last words 
of David, the sweet psalmist of Israel : the Spirit op 
THE Lord spake by me, and his Word was in my 
TONGUE." ^ Shall it be thought that all the words of 
the prophet Solomon still continued infallible, when he 
fell into idolatry in his old age, and the salvation of his 
soul became a problem for the Church of God ? And 
to come down to Christ's holy apostles and prophets 
(Eph. iii. 5), shall it be thought that all the words of 
Paul himself were infallible, and that he still could say 
that " Christ spoke by him" ^ when there was a sharp 
contention (-rra^o^vff/xhg) betwixt him and Barnabas;* 
or when, in the midst of the council, under a mistaken 
impression with regard to the person of the High Priest, 
he " spoke evil of the Ruler of his people/' and cried, 
" God shall strike thee, thou whited wall ; " or further 
(since there may remain some doubt as to the character 
of this reprimand), shall it be thought that all the words 

» Jer. liv. 14, xxiii. 11, 16; Ezek. xiii. 2, 3. 
2 2 Sam. xxiii. 1,2. 3 2 Cor. xiii. 3. ■» Acts xy. 39. 

12 



116 ILLUMINATION NOT INSPIRATION. 

of the apostle St Peter were infallible, when, at Antioch, 
he showed himself " so much to be blamed" {^anyvu^G- 
j!tsvog); when he feared those that came from St James; 
when he dissembled ; and when he forced the apostle 
St Paul " to withstand him to his face before them all, 
because he walked not uprightly according to the truth 
of the gospel (oux ^v h^6(iirobr,6ag) 1" ^ 

XIV. What, then, are we to conclude from this first 
difference which we have recognised as existing between 
illumination and inspiration, with respect to the dura- 
tion of those gifts ? 

We must conclude from it, 

1. That these two operations of the Holy Ghost differ 
in their essence, and not in their degree only. 

2. That the infallibility of the sacred writers depended 
not on their illumination (which, although raised to an 
extraordinary measure in the case of some of them, they 
nevertheless enjoyed in common with all the saints), 
but solely on their divine inspiration. 

3. That divinely-inspired words, having been mira- 
culous, are also all of them the words of God, 

4. That as our faith in every part of the Bible rests 
no longer on the illumination of the writers, but on the 
inspiration of their writings, it may dispense henceforth 
with the perplexing study of their internal state, of the 
degree in which they were enlightened, or of that of 
their holiness; but must stay itself in all things on God, 
in nothing on man. 

XV. If such have been the difference between illu- 
mination and inspiration in the prophets and the apostles, 
as respects the duration of those gifts, what has it been 
as respects their measure ? 

Illumination is susceptible of degrees ; inspiration 
does not admit of them. A prophet is more or less 
enlightened by God; but what he says is not more or 

»SeeGal. ii. 11, 14. 



THE DIVINE AND THE HUMAN SPIRIT. 11? 

less inspired. It is so, or it is not so ; it is from God, 
or it is not from God; here there is neither measure nor 
degree, neither increase nor diminution. David was 
enlightened by God ; John Baptist more than David ; a 
simple Christian possibly more than John Baptist; an 
apostle was more enlightened than that Christian, and 
Jesus Christ more than that apostle. But the inspired 
word of David, what do I say ? the inspired word of 
Balaam himself is that of God, as was that of John 
Baptist, as was that of St Paul, as was that of Jesus 
Christ! It is the Word of God. The most en- 
lightened of the saints cannot speak by inspiration, 
whilst the most wricked, the most ignorant, and the most 
impure of men, may speak not of his own will (a^' savrov 
ovx siTiTv)^ but by inspiration (aXXa -r^o^^jrsL/ffa/.)^ 

In a man who is truly regenerated, there is always 
the divine spirit and the human spirit, which operate 
at once — the one enlightening, the other darkening ; 
and the illumination will be so much the greater, the 
more that of the divine Spirit surpasses that of the 
human spirit. In the prophets, and, above all, in the 
apostles, these two elem.ents also are to be found. But, 
thanks be to God, our faith in the words of Scripture 
nowise depends on the unknown issue of that combat 
which w^as waged between the Spirit and the flesh in 
the soul of the sacred writers. Our faith goes directly 
to the heart of God. 

XVI. Can much harm result from the doctrine ac- 
cording to which the language of inspiration would be 
no more than the human expression of a superhuman 
revelation, and, so to speak, of a natural reflection of a 
supernatural illumination ? 

One or other of two evils will always result from it ; 
either the oracles of God will be brought down to the 
level of the words of the saints, or these last will be 
raised to the level of the Scriptures. 

*John xi. 51. 



118 INSPIRATION CONFOUNDED WITH ILLUMINATION. 

This is a deplorable consequence, the alternative in- 
volved in ^vhich has been reproduced in all ages It 
became unavoidable. 

All truly regenerated men being enlightened by the 
Holy Ghost, it woukl follow, according to this doctrine, 
that they would all possess, though in different degrees, 
the element of inspiration ; so that, according to the ar- 
bitrary idea which you would form to yourselves of their 
spiritual condition, you would be led inevitably sometimes 
to assimilate the sacred writers to them, sometimes to 
raise them to the rank of writers inspired from above. 

XVII. Might religious societies be mentioned in 
which the former of these two evils is realized ; 1 mean 
to say, where people have been led, by this path, to 
lower the Scriptures to the level of the sayings of saints ? 

All the systems of the Protestant doctors who assume 
that there is some mixture of error in the Holy Scrip- 
tures, are based on this doctrine; from Sender and 
Ammon to Eichhorn, Paulus, Gabler, Schuster, and 
Restig ; from M. de Wette to the more respectable sys- 
tems of Michaelis, Rosenmiiller, Scaliger, Capellus, 
John le Clerc, or of Vossius. According to these 
theories, the divine light with which the intellects Oi' 
the sacred writers was enlightened, might suffer some 
partial eclipses, through the inevitable effect of their 
natural infirmities, of a defect of memory, of innocent 
ignorance, of popular prejudice ; so that traces of these 
have remained in their >Yri tings, and so that we can 
perceive in these where their shadows have fallen. 



XVIII. Might religious societies be mentioned also, 
where the latter of these evils has been consummated ; 
I mean to say, where, in consequence of having been 
willing to confound inspiration with illumination, saints 
and doctors have been elevated to the rank of divinely 
mspired men ? 

Of these, two in particular may be mentioned, the 
Jews and the Latins. 



JE"VnSH RESPECT FOR THEIR DOCTORS. 119 

XIX. What have the Je^vs done ? 

They have considered the rabbins of the successive 
ages of the Dispersion as endowed with an infallibility 
which put them on a level with (if not above) Moses 
and the prophets. They have, to be sure, attributed a 
kind of divine inspiration to holy Scripture ; but they 
have prohibited the explanation of its oracles otherAvise 
than according to their traditions. They have called 
the immense body of those commandments or' men the 
oral law (ri zyz-c r-r), the Doctrine^ or the TahnuJ 
(—•:'•;.-), distinguishing it into the 3Iis/ino, or Second 
Law (rrr-;), and Gemnra, compleiJient or peifecixon 
(s-*:;). They have said that it passed from God to 
Moses, from Moses to Joshua, from Joshua to the pro- 
phets, from the prophets to Esdras, from Esdras to the 
doctors of the great synagogue, and from them to the 
rabbins Antigone, Soccho, Shemaia. Hillel, Schammai, 
until at last Juda the saint deposited it in the traditions 
or repetitions of the law (r-rr*:, hi-jTz^'xc-iz')^ which 
afterwards, with their commentary or complement (the 
gemara)^ formed, first, the Talmud of Jerusalem^ and 
afterwards that of Bahi/lon. 

" One of the greatest obstacles that we have to en- 
counter in dealing with the Jews," says the missionary 
!MacCaul, " is their invincible prejudice in favour of 
their traditions and of their commentaries, so that we 
cannot prevail on them to buy our Bibles without notes 
or commentaries." ^ 

" The law they say is salt ; the mishna, pepper ; the 
talmuds, aroraatics :" " the Scripture is water ; the mish- 
na. wine; the gemara, spiced wine." " My son." says 
rabbi Isaac, " learn to pay more attention to the words 
of the scribes than to the words of the law." " Turn 
away your children" (said rabbi Eleazar, on his death- 
bed, to his scholars, who asked him the way of life), 
" turn away your children from the study of the Bible, 
and place them at the feet of the wise." " Learn, my 

1 Letter from Warsaw, 22d March 1827. 



120 FATAL RESULT OF WRONG PRINCIPLES. 

son," says the rabbi Jacob, " that the words of the 
scribes are more agreeable than those of the prophets!" ^ 

XX. And what has been the result of these mon- 
strous principles ? 

It is, that by this means millions and millions of im- 
mortal souls, although wandering upon the earth, al- 
though weary and heavy laden, although every where 
despised and persecuted, have contrived to carry the 
book of the Old Testament, intact and complete, among 
all the nations of the whole world, without ceasing to 
read it in Hebrew every Sabbath, in thousands of syna- 
gogues, for the last eighteen hundred years, .... 
without, notwithstanding all this, recognising there that 
Jewish Messiah whom we all adore, and the knowledge 
of whom would be at this day their deliverance, as it 
behoves one day to be their happiness and their glory! 

" Full well," said Jesus to them, " full' well ye reject 
the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own 
tradition." ^ 

XXI. And what have the Latins done ? 

They have considered the fathers, the popes, and the 
councils of the successive ages of the Roman Church, as 
endowed with an infallibility which puts them on a level 
with Jesus, the prophets, and the apostles, if not above 
them. They have differed greatly, it is true, from each 
other on the doctrine of the inspiration of the Scrip- 
tures ; and the faculties of Douay and Louvain, for ex- 
ample, have vigorously opposed^ the opinion of the Je- 
suits, who would see nothing in the operation of the 

1 In the Talmud of Jerusalem — Encycl. Method, at the 'word Jtii/s. 

2 Mark vii. 9, see also xiii. and Matt. xv. 3-9. The mischief of 
those traditions begins at hist to reve;il itself to the Jews of our 
days: " Tho time is come," says the Israelite doctor Creissenach 
{Entwickelun()s Oeschichte den Mosaischen, Ritual Oesetzes, Pref. \ 
*'the time is come when the Talmud will precipitate the Jewish reli- 
gion into the most profound and humiliating downfall, if all the 
popular teachers of the Jews do not loudly declare that its statutes 
are of human origin, and may be changed." 

8 Censure of 1588. 



ERRORS OF THE COUNCIL OF TRENT. 121 

Holy Ghost but a direction preserving the sacred writers 
i'rom error ; but all have forbidden the explanation of 
the Scriptures otherwise than by their traditions.^ They 
have thought themselves entitled to say, in all their 
councils, as did the apostles and prophets at Jerusalem, 
'* It hath seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us" 
They have declared that it appertained to them to pro- 
nounce upon the true meaning of holy Scripture. They 
have called the immense body of those commandments 
of men, the oral laic, the unwritten traditions^ the un- 
taritten law. They have said that they have been trans- 
mitted by God, and dictated by the mouth of Jesus 
Christ, or of the Holy Ghost, by a continual succession. 
" Seeing," says the Council of Trent, ^ " that the 
saving truth and discipline of manners are contained in 
the "written books and the unwritten traditions, which, 
having been received by the apostles from the mouth 
of Jesus Christ, or from the inspiration of the Holy 
Ghost, by succession of time are come down to us, 
following the example of the apostolic fathers, the 
Council receives with the same affection and reverence 
{pari pietatis et reverentiw affectii)^ and honours all the 
books of the Old and New Testament (seeing that God 
is their author), and together with them the traditions 
relating to faith as well as manners, as having been dic- 
tated by the mouth of Jesus Christ or of the Holy 
Ghost, and preserved in the Catholic Church by con- 
tinual succession." " If any one receive not the whole 
of the said books, with all their parts, as holy and ca- 
nonical as they have been wont to be read in the Ca- 
tholic Church, and in the old vulgate translation " (that 
of Jerome,^ which, especially in Job and the Psalms, is 

1 Council of Trent, session 4, 2d decree of 28th April 1546. — Bel- 
larmin. De Eccl. lib. iii. cap. 14; lib. iv. cap. 3, 5, 6, 7, 8. — Coton, 
lib. ii. cap. 24, 34, 35. — De Perron contra Tilenus. 

* Council of Trent, first decree, session 4. 

3 It was in vain that the Abbot Isidore Clarius represented at the 
Council tliat there was temerity in ascribing inspiration to a writer 
who himself assures us that he had none (Father Paul, Hist, of the 
Council of Trent, p. 148 of Edition London, 1676). 



122 BULL EXSCRGE — BULL UMGEMTUS. 

crammed with yerj numerous, very serious, and very 
evident errors, and has even been corrected abundantly 
since by other popes),^ " or knowingly despises the said 
traditions, let him be accursed ! " 

They have thus put the bulls of the bishops of Rome, 
and the decrees of their synods, above the Scriptures. 
" Holy Scripture," say they, " does not contain all that 
is necessary for salvation, and is not sutBcient." ^ "It 
is obscure," ^ " It does not belong to the people to read 
Holy Scripture."* " We must receive with obedience of 
faith many things that are not contained in Scripture." " 
" We must serve God according to the tradition of the 
ancients." ^ 

The bull Exsurge of Leo X.^ places in the number of 
Luther's heresies his having said, " That it is not in the 
power of the Church, or of the Pope, to establish ar- 
ticles of faith." 

The bull Unigenitus^ Q.on^evcvus to perpetuity, as being 
respectively false, captious, scandalous, pernicious, rash, 
suspected of heresy, savouring of heresy, heretical, im- 
pious, blasphemous, &c., the following propositions : — 
" It is profitable at all times, in all places, and for all 
sorts of persons, to study the Scriptures, and to become 
acquainted with their spirit, piety, and mysteries," (on 
1 Cor. xvi. 5.)^ " The reading of Holy Scripture in the 
hands of a man of business, and a financier, shons that 
it is intended for every body," (on Acts viii. 28.) ^" 
" The holy obscurity of the AVord of God is no ground 
for the laity's being dispensed from reading it," (on 

1 See Tliomas James, Bellum Pnpale sive Concordia Discors Sexti 
V. et Cleiiieniis VIII. » Bellirmin. De Verho Dei, lib. iv. 

3 Idem, III), iii. — Charron, Verite 3.— Coton, lib. ii. cap. 19, — 
Bayle, traite. 

* Bellarmin. T>e Verho Dei, lib. ii. cap 19. 

* Bellarmin. lib. iv. cap. 3, and De Perron contre Tilenus. — Coton, 
lib. ii. caj). "24. 

« Id. Ikll.irmm. lib. iv. cap. 5. — Coton, lib. ii. cap. 34, 35. — 
Council o' Trent, 8(>S8. 4. 

7 l.ViO. Concil., Harduini, t. ix. p. 189.3. 

8 Clement Xi. of 8th September 1713. 

» Proposition 79, "' Proposition 80. 



ENCYCLICAL EPISTLE OP POPE LFO XIT. 123 



Acis viii. 30, 31.) " The Lord's day ought to be sancti- 
fied by the reading^ of books of piety, and especially of 
the Scriptures. They are the milk which God himself, 
who knows our hearts, has supplied for them. It is 
dangerous to desire being weaned from it." — (Acts xv. 
29. " It is a mistake to imagine that the knowledge 
of the mysteries of religion ought not to be communi- 
cated to that sex (women) by the reading of the holy 
books, after this example of confidence with which Jesus 
Christ manifests himself to this woman (the Samari- 
tan)." *' It is not from the simplicity of women, but 
from the proud learning of men, that abuse of the Scrip- 
tures has arisen, and heresies have been generated." — 
(John iv. 26.) " It amounts to shutting the mouth of 
Christ to Christians, and to wresting from their hands 
the holy book, or to keep it shut to them by depriving 
them of the means of hearing it." — (1 Thess. v 2.) " To 
interdict Christians from reading it, is to interdict chil- 
dren from the use of light, and to subject them to a 
kind of excommunication," (on Luke xi. 33.)^ 

Still more lately, in 1824, the encyclical epistle of 
Pope Leo XII. mournfully complains of the Bible So- 
cieties, " which," it says, " violate the traditions of the 
fathers (! ! !) and the Council of Trent, by circulating the 
Scriptures in the vernacular tongues of all nations." 
(" No7i vos laf.et, venerandi fratres^ societatem quamdam^ 
dictam vulgo Biblicam, per totum orlem audacter va- 
gari quce spretis S. S. Patrum t7riditioiiihvs {!!!) et 
contra notissimum Tridentini Concilii decretmn in id 
collatis viribus ac modis omnibus hitendit, ut in vidgares 
Unguas nationum omnium sacra vertantiir vel potius 
pervertantur Bihlia.'^) " In order to avert this pest," 
he says, " our predecessors have published several con- 
stitutions, . . . tending to show how pernicious for the 
faith and for morals this perfidious institution (the 
Bible Society) is ! (ut ostendatur quantopere fidei et 
moribus vaferrimum hocce inventum noxium sit !)" 

» Exod. XX. 4, 5. 



124 FATAL RESULT OF COUNCIL OF TRENX's DECREES. 

XXII. And what has be^n the result of these mon- 
strous principles ? 

It is this, that millions and millions of immortal 
souls in France, in Spain, in Italy, in Germany, and in 
America, and even in the Indies, although tliey carry 
every where intact and complete the New Testament, 
although they have not ceased to read it in Latin, every 
Lord's day, in thousands and thousands of churches, for 
twelve hundred years, .... have been turned a.\ay 
from the fountains of life, have, like the Jews, " paid 
more attention to the words of the scribes than to those 
of the law;" have diverted their children, according to 
the counsel of Eleazer, " from the study of the Bible, 
to place them at the feet of the wise." They have found, 
like rabbi Jacob, " the words of the scribes more agree- 
able than those of the prophets." It is thus that they 
have contrived, for twelve centuries, to maintain doc- 
trines the most contrary to the Word of God,^ on the 
worship of images;^ on the exaltation of the priests; on 
their forced celibacy ; on their auricular confession ; on 
the absolution which they dare to give ; on the magical 
power which they attribute even to the most impure 
among them, of creating his God with three Latin words, 
opere operato ; on an ecclesiastical priesthood, of which 
Scripture has never said a word ; on prayers to the dead ; 
on the spiritual pre-eminence of the city wliich the 
Scripture has called Babylon ; on the use of an unknown 
tongue in worship ; on the celestial empire of the 
blessed but humble woman to whom Jesus himself said, 
" Woman, what have I to do with thee ? '' on the mass ; 
on the taking away of the cup ; on the interdiction of 
the Scriptures to the people ; on indulgences ; on pur- 
gatory; on the universal episcopate of an Italian priest; 
on the interdiction of meals ; so that just as people 

> Exod. XX. 4, 5. 

2 Qiiisquis elanguerit erga venerabilium imaginum adorationem 
(••{o<r«6v»i<r/»), hunc anathemizat sancta nostra et universalis synodus! 
(was written to the Emperor, in the name of the whole Second 
Council of Nice). (Concil., torn. vii. p. 585). 



IMPULSION .AND SUGGESTION. 125 

annul the sole priesthood of the Son of man by esta- 
blishing other priesthoods by thousands, just as they 
annul his divinity by acknowledging thousands of demi- 
gods or dead men, present in all places, hearing 
throughout the -whole earth the most secret prayers of 
human beings, protecting cities and kingdoms, ^vorking 
miracles in favour of their worshippers ; . . . just so, 
also, they annul the inspiration of Scripture, by acknow- 
ledging by thousands other writings which share in its 
divine authority, and which surpass and swallow up its 
eternal infallibility ! 

It was in opposition to the very similar tenets main- 
tained by the heretics of his time, that Saint Irenaeus 
said, " For when convicted by the Scriptures, they turn 
about and accuse the Scriptures themselves, as if they 
were imperfect, and wanting in authority, and uncertain, 
and as if one could not hnd the truth in tbem, if ig- 
norant of tradition ; for that w^as given, not in writing, 
but by the livijig voice." ^ 

" Full well," says Jesus to them too, ^' ye reject the 
commandments of God, that ye may keep your own 
traditions! Bene irritumfacitis prccceplum Dei, ut tra- 
ditionem vestram servetis!" — (Mark vii. 9.) 

XXIII. Without pretending anyhow to explain how 
the Holy Ghost could dictate the thoughts and the 
words of the Scriptures (for the knowledge of this mys- 
tery is neither given to us, nor asked of us), what is it 
that one can perceive in this divine action ? 

Why, two things; first, an impulsion, that is, an ac- 
tion on the will of the men of God, in order to make 
them speak and write ; and, secondly, a suggestion, that 
is to say, an action on their understandings and on their 
organs, in order to their producing, first, within them 



> Adv. Haeres., lib. iii. cap. 2. "Cum enim ex Scripturis arguun- 
tur, in accusationem convertuntur ipsarum Scripturarum, quHsi non 
recte habeant, neque sint ex auctoritate, et quia varie sunt dictae, et 
quia non possit ex his inveniri Veritas ab his qui nesciant traditionem. 
Non ciiim per litteras traditam illam, sed per vivam vocem." 



126 OBJECTIONS STATED AND ANSWERED. 



more or less exalted notions of the truth they were 
about to utter; and, then, without them such human 
expressions as were most divinely suitable to the eternal 
thought of the Holy Ghost. 

XXIV. Meanwhile, must it be admitted that the 
sacred writers were no more than merely the pens, 
hands, and secretaries of the Holy Ghost ? 

They were, no doubt, hands, secretaries, and pens ; 
but they were, in almost every case, and in very dif- 
ferent d{'grees. living pens, intelligent hands, secretaries 
docile, affected by what they wrote, and sanctified. 

XXY. Was not the "Word of God, however, often 
written as suggested by the occasion ? 

Yes, no doubt ; and the occasion was prepared by God, 
just as the writer was. " The Holy Ghost," says Claude,^ 
" employed the pen of the evangelists . . . and of the pro- 
phets. He supplied them Avith the occasions on which 
they wrote ; he gave them the wish and the strength to 
do so; the matter, form, order, economy, expressions, 
are from his immediate inspiration and direction." 

XXYI. But do we not clearly recognise, in the 
greater part of the sacred books, the individual cha- 
racter of the person who writes ? 

Far from disowning this, we, on the contrary, ad- 
mire its being so. The individual character which 
comes from God, and not from sin and the fall, was 
prepared and sanctified by God for the work to which 
it had been destined by God. 

XXYII. Ought Ave, then, to think that all has been 
equally inspired of God, in each of the books of Holy 
Scripture ? 

Scripture, in speaking of what it is, docs not admit 
any distinction. All these sacred books, without ox- 

1 Claude. OEuvres Posthumes, vol. iv. p. '228 



DOCTRINE OF THE JEWS IN CHRIST S TIME. 12? 

ception, are the word of the Lord. All Scripture, 
says St Paul {-ra^a y^aipri)^ is inspired by God. 

This declaration, as we have already said, is sus- 
ceptible of two constructions, according as we place the 
verb, not expressed but understood, before or after the 
Greek word which we here translate inspired hy God; 
— both these constructions invincibly establish, that in 
the apostle's idea, all without exception, in each and 
all of the books of the Scriptures, is dictated by the 
Spirit of God. In fact, in both the apostle equally 
attests that these holy letters (ra /f^a y^a/x/xara), 
of which he had been speaking to Timothy, are all 
divinely inspired Scriptures. 

Now, we know that in the days of Jesus Christ, the 
whole Church meant one sole and the same collec- 
tion OF BOOKS by the Scripture^ the Holy Scripture^ or 
the Scriptures, or the Holy Letters^ or the Law and 
the Prophets, (^'y^a<pri,^ or tj y^cifri ayia^ or a) y^af a/,* 
or 6 vo'/xo; %ai oi 'rPo:priTai,^ or ru Isocc yod/j-fjia-a ^). 
These were the twenty two sacred books which the 
Jews held from their prophets, and on which they were 
all perfectly agreed.^ 

This entire and perfect divine inspiration of all the 
Scriptures of the Jews was so fully, in the days of Jesus 
Christ, the doctrine of the whole of that ancient people 
of God (as it was that of Jesus Christ, of Timothy, 
and of St Paul), that we find the following testimony 
to it in the works of the Jewish general Joseph us (who 
had reached his thirtieth year^ at the time when the 
Apostle Paul wrote his Second Epistle to Timothy). 
" Never " (says he, in speaking of " the twenty-two 
books''^ of the Old Testament, which he calls roc ibia 

i 2 Peter i. CO; John x. .35, xvii. 12, xix, 37. ^ Rom. i. 2. 

8 John V. 39; Matt. xxi. 42, xxvi. 54; Rom. xv. 4; 1 Cor. xv. 3. 

*Act3 xxiv. 14; Luke xvi. 16, 29, 31; Matt. v. 17, 18; John x. 34. 

5 2 Tim. iii. 15. « See Krehs and Laesner, on 2 Tim. iii. 15. 

7 He was born in the year 37. See his Life, Edit. Aureliae Allobr. 
p. 999. 

^Contra Apion,lib. i. p. 1837. (ZCo f^Uva, r(os reis iixoffi fitfiXia,.) OuT 
Bibles reckon thirty-nine books in the Old Testament; but Josephus 

13 



1 28 TESTIMONY OF JOSEPHUS. 

y^d{X[M(x,ra^ as St Paul calls them here rd 'n^a y^dfM- 
fMara), " never, although many ages have elapsed, has 
any one dared either to take away, or to add, or to 
TRANSPOSE in these any thing whatever;^ for it is >vith 
all the Jews, as it were an inborn conviction (IIASI bt 
ffv/M^vrSv itfr/i/), from their very earliest infancy,^ to call 
them God's teachings, to abide in them, and, if neces- 
sary, to die joyfully in maintaining them."^ 

" They are given to us" (he says further) " by the 
inspiration that comes from God (xard r/yv Ic/Vko/av 
T'^v d'TTo rov Qiov) ; but as for the other books, com- 
posed since the times of Artaxerxes, they are not thought 
worthy of a like faith." * 

These passages from Josephus are not quoted here 
as an authority for our faith, but as an historical testi- 
mony, showing the sense in which the apostle St Paul 
spoke, and attesting to us that, in mentioning the holy 
letters (rd li^d y^d^/>tara), and in saying that they are 
all divinely inspired Scriptures, he meant to declare to 
us that, in his eyes, there was nothing in the sacred 
books which was not dictated by God. 

Now, since the books of the N"ew Testament are /spd 
7^d,a/xara, Holp Scriptures, the Scriptures, the Holy 
Letters^ as well as those of the Old ; since the apostles 
have put their writings, and since St Peter, for example, 
has put ALL THE LETTERS OF Paul (rrdffccg rdc smff- 
roXdg) in the same rank with the rest of the Scrip- 
tures (ojg xai Tag XohTrdg rPA(I>A2), hence we ought 
to conclude that all is inspired by God in all the books 
of the Old and New Testament. 

and the ancient Jews, by making one book each of the two books of 
S.imuel, of Kin.i,'8, and of Chronicles, by throwing together Ruth 
and Judyjes, Esdras and Nehemiah, Jeremiah and Lamentations, and 
finally, Hosea and tlie eleven minor prophets that folh w respec- 
tively, into one book, reduced our modern calculation of their sacred 
books by sovoiitcen unit?. 

> 'Oyri" nP029EINAI T/f ovlh our. A*EAEIN eckrS,, ,Zrt METAOEl- 

NAI TITCXjt*»JXI>. 

- EuOu( ix TTtf fr^i-mt yiy«Vi*if iiouaiiH Sturit 0EOT AOTMATA (accord- 
in'4 to othtTS : jrnm the fir»t (jenaraiion.) 



THE BIBLE TESTIFIES TO ITSELF. 129 

XXYIII. But if all the sacred books (ra 'n^a y^d/j.- 
Atara) are divinely inspired, how can we discover that 
such and such a book is a sacred book, and that such 
another is not one ? 

This, in a great measure, is a purely historical question. 

XXIX. Yet, have not the Reformed Churches main- 
tained that it was by the Holy Ghost that they recog- 
nised the divinity of the sacred books ; and, for exam - 
pie, has not the Confession of Faith of the Churches of 
France said in its 4th article, that we know these books 
to be canonical, and a very certain rule of our faith, 
not so much by the common accord and agreement of 
the Church, as by the testimony and the persuasion of 
the Holy Ghost, which enables us to discern between 
them and the other ecclesiastical books ? 

This maxim is perfectly true, if you apply it to the 
sacred books as a whole. In that sense the Bible is 
evidently an a-oroinsrog book, which needs ilself only 
in order to be believed. To the man, whoever he be, 
that studies it " with sincerity and as before God," ^ it 
presents itself evidently, and of itself, as a miraculous 
book; it reveals all that is hidden in men's consciences; it 
discerns the thoughts and affections of the heart. It has 
foretold the future; it has changed the face of the world; 
it has converted souls ; it has created the Church. Thus 
it produces in men's hearts " an inward testimony and 
conviction of the Holy Ghost," which attests its inimi- 
table divinity, independently of any testimony of men. 
But we do not think that our Churches ever ventured 
to affirm that one might be content to abide by this 
mark for discerning such or such a book, or such or 
such a chapter, or such or such a verse of the Word of 
God, and for ascertaining its celestial origin. They 
think that for this detail one must look, as they did, 
" to the common accord and agreement of the Church." 
We ought to admit as divine the entire code of the 

1 2 Cor. iL 17. 



130 OPINIONS OF LUTHER AND DR TWESTEN. 

Scriptures, before each of its parts has enabled us to 
prove by itself that it is of God. It does not belong to 
us to judge this book; it is this book which will judge 
us. 

XXX. Nevertheless, has not Luther/ starting from 
a principle laid down by St Paul ^ and by St John,' 
said, that " the touchstone by which one might recog- 
nise certain scriptures as divine, is this : Do they 
preach Christ or do they not preach him?"* And among 
the moderns, has not Dr Twesten also said, " that the 
different parts of the Scriptures are more or less in- 
spired, according as they are more or less preaching; 
and that inspiration does not extend to words and his- 
torical matters beyond what has a relation to the Chris- 
tian conscience, beyond what proceeds from Christ, or 
serves to show us Christ." ^ 

Christ is, no doubt, the way, the truth, and the life ; 
the spirit of prophecy, no doubt, is the testimony of 
Jesus; ^ but this touchstone might in our hands prove 
fallacious : 1st, Because many writings speak admirably 
of Christ without being inspired ; 2d, Although all 
that is to be found in the inspired Scriptures relates to 
Jesus Christ, possibly we might fail to perceive this 
divine character at a first glance; and 3d, In fine, be- 
cause we ought to BELIKVK BEFORE SEEING it, that all 
Scripture is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for cor- 
rection, and for instruction in righteousness : that the 
man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto 
all good works.^ 

XXXI. What reasons have we, then, for recognis- 
ing as sacred each of the books which, at the present 
day, form for us the collection of the Scriptures ? 

For the Old Testament we have the testimony of the 

» In hia preface to the Epistles of James and Jude, 
■ a 1 Cor. iii. 9, 10. a i John iv. 2. 

* Ob sie Cliristiun treiben, odor nicht. 

* Vorlesuiij^en liber die Dogmatik, 18L'9, I. B. p. 4'Jl-429. 
^ John xiv. 6.— Apoc, xix. 10. ^ 2 Tim. iii. 16. 



THE OLD TESTAMENT COMMITTED TO THE JEWS. 131 

Jewish Church ; and for the New Testament the testi- 
mony of the Catholic Church. 

XXXII. What must here be understood by the tes 
timony of the Jewish Church ? 

We must understand by it the common opinion of 
all the Jews, Egyptian and Syrian, Asiatic and Euro- 
pean, Sadducean and Pharisees/ ancient and modern, 
good and bad. 

XXXIII. What reason have we to hold for divine, 
the books of the Old Testament which the Church of 
the Jews has given us as such ? 

It is written, " that unto them were committed the 
oracles of God ;"^ which means, that God in his wisdom 
chose them for being, under the Almighty government 
of his providence, sure depositories of his written word. 
Jesus Christ received their sacred code, and we accept 
of it as he did. 

XXXIY. Shall our faith then depend upon the 

Jews ? 

The Jews often fell into idolatry ; they denied the 
faith ; they slew their prophets ; they crucified the 
King of kings ; since that they have hardened their 
hearts for near two thousand years ; they have filled 
up the measure of their sins, and wrath " is come upon 
them to the uttermost."^ Nevertheless, to them were 
committed the oracles of God. And albeit that these 
oracles condemn them, albeit that the veil remains on 
their hearts when they read the Old Testament ; * albeit 
they have for ages despised the Word of God, and wor- 
shipped their Talmud; they have not been able not to 

1 See Josephus agt. Appion, liv. i. p. 1037. Philo in Eichorn. 
Joseph, in Nov. Repert., p. 239. De ^gypticis Judaeis; cf. Eichorn- 
Einleit ins A. T. R. I., § 21, p. 73, 89, 91, 113, 114, 116. De Sad- 
ducceis, § 35, p. 95. And Semler (Apn. ad liberal., V. T. inter- 
pret., p. 11.) Eichorn Alg. Bibl. der Bibl. Litterat. T. IV. p. 275, 
276. 2 Rom. iii. 2. 

3 1 Thess. ii. 16. *2 Cor. iii. 15. 



132 FIDELITY OF THE JEWS TO THEIR TRUST. 

give us the hook of the Scriptures intact and complete ; 
and the historian Josephus might still say of them 
what he wrote eighteen hundred years ago : " After the 
lapse of so many centuries (toc^o-jtou yao alojvoc r,dr, 
ra^'jj^7]x6rog), no one among the Jews has dared to 
ADD or to TAKi; AWAY, or to transpose any thing in the 
sacred Scriptures." ^ 

XXXV. What, then, have been the warranty, the 
cause, and the means of this fidelity on the part of the 
Jews ? 

We shall reply to this question in but a very few 
words. Its warranty is to be found in the promises of 
God ; its cause in the providence of God ; and its 
means in the concurrence of the five following circum- 
stances : — 

1. The religion of the Jews, which has carried their 
respect for the very letter of Scriptures even to a su- 
perstitious length. 

2. The indefatigable labours of the Masorethes, who 
so carefully guarded its purity, even to the slightest 
accents. 

•3. The rivalry of the Judaical sects, none of which 
would have sanctioned any want of faithfulness on the 
part of the others. 

4. The extraordinary dispersion of that people in all 
countries long before the ruin of Jerusalem ; for " of 
old time," says St James,^ " Moses hath in every 
(pagan) city them that preach him, being read in the 
synagogues every Sabl)ath-day." 

5. Finally, the innumerable copies of the sacred book 
difi'used among all nations. 

XXXVI. And with respect to the New Testament, 
what are we now to understand by the testimony of the 
Catliolic Church ? 

By this we are to understand the universal agreement 

1 See this auot:ition at question 27. 

* Acta XV. 21. Josephus often attests the same fuct. 



THE NE-W TESTAMENT — UOVT PREPERVED. 1 .?3 

of the ancient and modem Churches, Asiatic and Euro- 
pean, good and bad, which call on the name of Jesus 
Christ ; that is to say, not only the faithful sects of the 
blessed Reformation, but the Greek sect, the Arminian 
sects, the S>Tian sect, the Roman sect, and perhaps we 
might add the Unitarian sects.^ 

XXXVII. Should our faith then be founded on the 
Catholic Church ? 

All Churches have erred, or might hare erred. 
Many have denied the faith, persecuted Jesus Christ in 
his members, denied his divinity, made his cross of none 
effect, restored the worship of statues and graven images, 
exalted the priests, shed the b^ood of the saints, inter- 
dicted the use of the Scriptures to the people, committeri 
to the flames those of the faithful who desired to read 
them in the vernacular tongue, have set up in the tem- 
ple of God him who sits there as a God, have tram- 
pled upon the Scriptures, worshipped traditions, warred 
against God, and cast down the truth. Nevertheless, 
the new oracles of God have been committed to them, 
as those of the Old Testament were to the Jews. And 
albeit these oracles condemn them ; albeit for ages 
they have despised the Scriptures and almost adored 
their traditions; — they have not been able not to give us 
the Book of the Scriptures of the Xew Testament intact 
and complete ; and one may say of them, as Josephus 
said of Jews, " After the lapse of so many ages, never 
has any one in the Churches dared either to add or take 
away any thing in the Holy Scriptures." They have 
been compelled, in spite of themselves, to transmit them 
to us in their integrity. 

XXXVIII. Nevertheless has there not been in 

1 Followino: the example of the Scripture, we believe we may 
employ the word church as denoting, sometimes all that are enclosed 
in the nets of the Gospel, sometimes only all that in these is pure 
and living. And as for the word sect {cufu-tf. Acts xxiv. 14; xxvi. 5; 
xxvin. 2'2 . to.iuwing the aposile's exampit, we tmploy it here nei- 
ther in A i£ooa scuse uur in a bad seu&c. 



134 COUNCIL OF Trent's doings. 

Christendom one powerful sect, which for three hun- 
dred years has introduced into the canon of the Scrip- 
tures the Apocryphal Books, disavowed as they have 
been by the Jews ^ (as even Pope St Gregory himself 
attests),^ and rejected by the fathers of the ancient 
Church ^ (as St Jerome attests) ? 

This, it is true, is what was done for the Latin sect 
by the fifty-three persons who composed, on the 8th of 
April 1546, the famous Council of Trent, and who pre- 
tended to be the representatives of the Church univer- 
sal OF Jesus Christ.* But they could do it for the 
Old Testament only, which was entrusted to the Jews 
and not to the Christians. Neither that Council, nor any 
even of the most corrupt»and idolatrous Churches, have 
been able to add a single Apocryphal Book to the New 
Testament. God has not permitted this, however 
mischievous may have been their intentions. It is thus 
that the Jews have been able to reject the New Testa- 
ment, which was not committed to them ; while they 
HAVE never been ABLE to introduce a single book of 
man into the Old Testament. God has never permitted 
them to do so ; and, in particular, they have always ex- 
cluded from it those which the fifty-three ecclesiastics 
of Trent were daring enough to cause to be inserted 
in it, in the name of the universal Church. 



1 Joseph, agt. Ap. book I. 8. Euseb. H. E. lib. III., c. ix. x. 

2 Exposition of the Book of Job. See Father Paul's Hist, of the 
C. of Trent, book ii, p. 143. (London, 1676.) 

aOrijren (Euseb. H. E. lib. iv. c. 26). St Athanasius (Pascal 
Epistle). St Hilary (Prolog, in Psalmos, p. 9. Paris, 1693.) St 
Epiph. (Lardner, vol. iv. p. 312.) St Gregory Nazianzen (Carm. 
33, Op. torn. ii. p. 98). 

4 In praef. ad libr. Regum; sive Prologo-galeato. (See Lard. vol. t. 
p. 16-22). Judith, et Tobiae et Macchabaeorum libros legit quidem 
Ecclesia: sed eas inter caiionicas Scriptunis non rocijiit (Prietat. in 
Libros Siilora-Epist. 115). See also Symbolum Ruffiiii, toni. ix. 
p. 186 (Paris, 1602). "Some thought it strange that five cartlinala 
and forty-eight bishops should so easily define the miist principal 
and important points of religion, never deciiled before, giving cano- 
nical authority to books held for uncertain and apocryphal," &c. — 
Father Paul's Hist, of the C. of Trent, book ii. p. 153 (London, 1676). 
Most were Italians. 



WARRANTY, CAUSE, AND MEANS. 135 

XXXIX. And what have been the warranty, the 
cause, and tlie means of that fidelity, which the universal 
Church has shown in transmitting to us the oracles of 
God in the New Testament? 

To this question we shall reply but in a yery few 
words. 

The warranty has lain in the promises of God ; the 
cause in the providence of God ; and the means prin- 
cipally in the concurrence of the following circumstan- 
ces : — 

1 . The religion of the ancient Christians, and their 
extraordinary respect for the sacred texts ; a respect 
shown on all occasions in their churches,^ in their 
councils,^ in their oaths,^ and even in their domestic 
customs.* 

2. The pains taken by learned men in different ages 
to preserve the purity of the sacred text. 

3. The many quotations made from Scripture by the 
fathers of the Church. 

4. The mutual jealousy of the sects into which the 
Christian Church has been subdivided. 

5. The versions made from the first ages in many 
ancient tongues. 

6. The number and abundant dissemination of manu- 
scripts of the New Testament. 

7. The dispersion of the new people of God as far 
as the extremities of Asia, and to the farthest limits of 
the west. 

J Plotius contra Manich., t. i,; apud Wolf, anecd., p. 32 sq. I. 
Ciampiiii Rom. Vetera raonum., i. p. 126 sq. All the Christian con- 
gregations in the East, even the poorest, kept a collection of the 
sacred books in their oratories. See Scholz Proleg. 

2 Cyrill. Alex, in Apol. ad Theodos., imp. Act. Concil. ed. Mansi, 
t. vi. col. 579, vii. col. 6, ix. col. 187, xii. col. 1009, 1052, al. Prohi- 
tion, under pain of excommunication, against selling the sacred book 
to druggists, or other merchants, who don't buy them to read (6th 
Council, in Trullo. Can. 68). 

3 Corb. byz., i. p. 422, al. 

* See St Jerome, pref. on Job. S. Chrysost. Hom. 19, De Statuis. 
Women, stiys he, are wont to suspend copies of the Gospels from 
their cnildren's necks. See the 68th canon of the VI. Coun. in 
TruUo. 



136 OBJECTIVE, SUBJECTIVE, INSTRUMENTAL CAUSES. 

XL. Does it then result from these facts that the 
authority of the Scriptures is founded for us, as Bellar- 
min has said, on that of the Church ? 

The doctors of Rome, it is true, have gone so far as 
to say, that without the testimony of the Church the 
Scripture has no more authority than Livy, the Alcoran, 
or jEsop's fables;^ and Bellarmin, horrified no doubt 
at such impious opinions, would fain distinguish the au- 
thority of the Church in itself, and with respect to us 
(quoad se, et quoad nos). In this last sense, he says, 
the Scripture has no authority except by the testimony 
of the Church. Our answer will be very simple. 

Every manifestation having three causes, an objec- 
tive cause, a subjective cause, and an instrumental 
cause, one may say also that the knowdedge that we 
receive of the authority of the Scriptures has, first of 
all, for its objective cause, the Holy Bible itself, which 
proves its divinity by its own beauty, and by its own 
doings ; in the second place, for subjective or efficient 
cause, the Holy Ghost,^ who confirms and seals to our 
souls the testimony of God ; and in fine, in the third 
place, for instrumental cause, the Church, not the Ro- 
man, not the Greek, more ancient than the Roman, not 
even the Syriac, more ancient than either, but the Uni- 
versal Church. 

The pious St Augustine expresses this triple cause, 
in his book against the Epistle of Manicheus, called 
Fundamenti. In speaking of the time at which he 
was still a Manichean, he says : ' " I should not have 

1 Hosius contra Brentium, lib. iii. Eckius, de auth. Ecclesiae. 
Bayli Tractat. i., Catech., 9. 12. Andradius, lib. iii. Defens. Cone, 
Trident. Stapleton,adv. Wittaker, lib. i. c. 17. 

2 lea. liv. 13, lix. 21. 

8 Evangelio non crederem (according to the African usage for 
credidissem, as confession, lib. ii. c. 8 : Si tunc amarem, for amavis- 
eem) nisi me Ecclesiae commoveret (commovisset) aiuhoritas (ch. 5). 
(This, besides, is very classical Latin : Non ego hoc fcrrevi, says 
Horace, for tulissem, lib. iii. ode 14). Kos sequanmr qui nos invi- 
tant prius credere, qiium nondum valenius intueri, ut ipsa fide va- 
lentiores facti, quod crcdinuis intolligcre mereaniur, non jam homi- 
nibus, sed ipso Deo intrinsecus mcntein nostrani firniante et illu- 
uiinante (c. 14). Opera August., Paris, Mabillon, t. viii. 



THE CHURCH A DEPOSITORY, NOT A JUDGE. 137 

believed in the gospel had I not been drawn to it bj 
the authority of the Church ;" but he takes care to add : 
" Let us follow those who invite us first to believe, 
when we are not yet in a state to see : in order that, 
being rendered more capable (valeniiores) hy faith itself, 
we may deserve to comprehend what we believe. Then 
it will no more be men, it will be God himself within 
us, w^ho will confirm our souls and illuminate them." 

In this affair, then, the Church is a servant and not 
a mistress ; a depositary and not a judge. She exer- 
cises the office of a minister, not of a magistrate, mi- 
nisterium non magisterium} She delivers a testimony, 
not a judicial sentence. She discerns the canon of the 
Scriptures, she does not make it ; she has recognised 
their authenticity, she has not given it. And as the 
men of Sichem believed in Jesus Christ by means of 
the impure but penitent woman who called them to 
him, we say to the Church : " Now we believe, not 
because of thy saying ; for we have heard him ourselves, 
and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour 
of the world."* We have believed, then, per eam^ not 
propter ea^m^ through her means, not on her account. 
We found her on her knees ; she showed us her Master ; 
■we recognised him, and we knelt down along Avith her. 
Were I to mingle in the rear of an imperial army, and 
should I ask those around me to show me their prince, 
they would do with respect to him, for me, what the 
Church has done with regard to the Scriptures. They 
would not call their regiment the oecumenical army ; 
above all, they would not say that the emperor has no 
authority but what is derived from its testimony, whether 
as it respected itself or with respect to us ; whether 
quoad se or quoad nos (to use Bellarmin's language). 
The authority of the Scriptures is not founded, then, 
on the authority of the Church : it is the Church that 
is founded on the authority of the Scriptures. 



1 Turretini, Theologia elenct., vol. i. loc 2, quaest. 6. 
8 John iv. 42. 



138 HERE AUTHENTICITY PROVES INSPIRATION. 

XLI. If the authenticity of the Scriptures is proved 
in a great measure by history, how is their inspiration 
estabhshed ? 

Solely by the Scriptures. 

XLII. But is such an argument rational ? Does it 
not involve a begging of the question, and the proving 
of inspiration by inspiration ? 

There would be a begging of the question here, if, in 
order to prove that the Scriptures are inspired, we should 
invoke their testimony while assuming them to be in- 
spired. But we are far from adopting this process. 
First of all, the Bible is viewed solely in the light of an 
historical document, deserving our respect from its au- 
thenticity, and by means of which one may know the 
doctrine of Jesus Christ, nearly as one would learn that 
of Socrates from the books of Plato, or that of Leibnitz 
from the writings of Wolff. Now this document de- 
clares to us, in all its pages, that the whole system of 
the religion which it teaches, is founded on the grand 
fact of a miraculous intervention of God in the revela- 
tion of its history and its doctrines. 

The learned Michaelis, who held such loose princi- 
ples on inspiration, himself declares that the inspiration 
of the apostolic writings necessarily results from their 
authenticity. There is no other alternative, says he; 
if what they relate is true, they are inspired ; if they 
were not inspired, they would not be sincere ; but they 
are sincere, therefore they are inspired. 

There is nothing in such reasoning that can be thought 
like a begging of the question. 

XLIII. If it he by the Bible itself that we establish 
the dogma of a certain inspiration in the sacred books, 
by what can it be proved that that inspiration is uni 
versal, and tliat it extends to the minutest details ot the 
instructions tliey convey ? 

If it l)e the Scriptures that tell us of their divine 
inspiration, it is they too that will be able to inform us 



INSPIRATION WHEN FIRST IMPUGNED. 139 

in what divine inspiration consisted. In order to our 
admitting their inspiration on their own sole tesiiraony, 
it should have sufficed for us to he assured that thty 
were authentic ; but, in order to our admitting their 
plenary inspiration, we shall have something more ; for 
we shall then be able to invoke their testimony as 
writings already admitted to be divine. It uill no 
longer be authentic books only that say to us, I am in- 
spired ; but books, both authentic and inspired, will say 
to us, I am so altogether. The Scriptures are inspired, 
we affirm, because, being authentic and true, they say 
of themselves that they are inspired; but the Scriptures 
are plenarily inspired^ we also add, because, being in- 
spired, they say that they are so entirely, and without 
any exception. 

Here, then, there is neither more nor less than a 
doctrine which the Bible will teach us, as it teaches us 
all the rest. And just as we believe, because it tells us 
so, that Jesus Christ is God, and that he became man ; 
so also we believe that the Holy Ghost is God, and that 
he dictated the whole of the Scriptures. 



SECTION II. 

ON THE ADVERSARIES AND DEFENDERS OF THE DOCTRINE. 

XLIV. Who are the divines that have impugned 
the doctrine of the divine inspiration ? 

"We have one general remark to make before enume- 
rating them here, namely, that with the single excep- 
tion of Theodore of Mopsuestia, that philosophical di- 
vine whose numerous writings, so strongly tainted with 
Pelagianism, were condemned for their Nestorianism 
in the fifth oecumenical council (Constantinople, 553), 
and whose principles on the divine inspiration \vere very 
loose, — with the exception, we say, of Theodore of Mop- 
suestia, it has been found impossible to produce, in the 
long course of the eight fihst centuries of chris- 
14 



140 AGOBARD UNJUSTLY ACCUSED BY DUPIN. 

TiANiTY, a single doctor who has disowned the plenary 
inspiration of the Scriptures, unless it be in the bosom 
of the most violent heresies that have tormented the 
Christian Church ; that is to say, among the Gnostics, 
the Manicheans, the Anomeans, and the Mahometans. 
St Jerome himself, who sometimes permitted himself, 
while speaking of the style of certain parts of the sacred 
books, to use a language whose temerity will be cen- 
sured by all pious persons,^ nevertheless maintains, even 
for such passages, the entire inspiration of all the part:: 
of the sacred Scripture;^ and in that he farther sees, 
under what he calls the grossness of the language and 
the seeming absurdity of the reasonings, intentions on 
the part of the Holy Spirit full of profound art and 
wisdom. And if, transporting ourselves from the days 
of St Jerome to four hundred years farther down, we 
come to the celebrated Agobard, who is alleged by Dr 
Du Pin to have been the first of the fathers of the 
Church that abandoned the doctrine of a verbal inspi- 
ration,^ it is most unjustly, says Dr Rudell)ach, that 
such a charge has been brought against tliat bishop. 
It is true, that in disputing w4th the Abbot Fredigise,* 
touching the latitude to be allowed to Latin translators 
of the sacred text, he maintains that the dignity of the 
Word of God consists in the force of meaning, not in 
the pomp of words ; but he took care to add, that the 
authority of the apostles and the prophets remains in- 
tact, and that no one is permitted to believe that they 
could have placed a letter otherwise than they have 
done ; for their authority is stronger than heaven and 
earth.^ 



* Qui soloecismos in verbis facit, qui non potest hyperbaton red- 
dere, sententiamque conchuiere. (Comment, in epist. ad Titum. 
lib. i. [ad cap. i. 1.] F'.t ad Ephea., lib. ii. [ad cap. iii. 1.] See 
also his Comment on the Ep. to the Galatians). 

* Proem, in Ep. ad Galat., lib. ii. 

8 Du Pin, doctor of the Sorbonne. Prolegoni, on the Bible, liv. L 
V. 2o6. 

* Ajiobard, adv. Fredec: lib. c. 9-l'2. 

» Rudelbach, Zeitschrift, Ist part, 1840, p. 48. 



EARLY INPUGNERS OF DIVINE INSPIRAIION. 14] 

If, then, we would class, in the order of time, the 
men who controverted the entire divine inspiration of 
our sacred books, we must place : — 

In the 2d century^ the Gnostics (Valentine, Cerdo, 
Marcio, his disciple, &c.y They believed in two equal 
principles, independent, contrary, and co-etemal; the one 
good and the other bad; the one the father of Jesus Christ, 
and the other the author of the law; and, entertain- 
ing this idea, they rejected the Pentateuch, at the same 
time admitting no more of the New Testament than 
the gospel of Luke, and part of Paul's epistles. 

In the 3d century Manes or ]Maniclieus, who, calling 
himself the paraclete promised by Jesus Christ, corrected 
the books of the Christians, and added his own. 

In the 4:th century, the Anomeans or Ultra- Arians 
(for Arius himself held a more reserved language), who 
maintained, with their leader ^tius, that the Son, a 
created intelligence, unlike^ to the Father^ took to him- 
self a human body without a human soul. They spoke 
of the Scriptures with an irreverence tantamount to the 
denial of their entire inspiration. " When pressed with 
Scriptural reasons," says St Epiphanius, " they escape by 
saying : That it was as a man that the apostle said those 
things ;" or, " Why do you bring the Old Testament 
against me?" And what does the holy bishop add? 
" It was to be expected that those who denied the glory 
of Christ, should deny still more that of the apostles." ^ 

In the 5th century. Theodore of Mopsuestia, chief of 
the Antioch school, an able philosopher, and learned but 
rash divine. All that remains to us of his numerous 
works, is some fragments only, preserved to us by other 
authors. His books, as we have said, were condenmed 
(two hundred years after his death) at the Council of 
Constantinople. There were quoted there, for example, 
his writings against Appollinarius, in which he had 
said that the book of Job is merely a poem derived 
from a pagan source ; that Solomon had no doubt re- 

* ''AtifjMoe : hence their name. 

2 Epiphan., Advers. haer., LXX. vi. Min salutat. Confut., vi. 



142 MEDIEVAL IMPUGNERS OF DIVINE INSPIRATION. 

ceived Xoyov ^foucswc, but not \oyov co^piag ; that the 
Song of Songs is but a long and insignificant epithala- 
mium, without any character prophetical, historical, or 
scientific, and in the manner of the Symposion of Plato, 
etc, etc.^ 

In the 1th century, Mahomet (whose false religion is 
nothing more than a heresy of Christianity, and who 
speaks of Christ at least as honourably as most part of 
theSociuianshave done,) — Mahomet acknowledged, and 
often quoted as inspired, the books of the Old and New 
Testament ; but he said they had been corrupted, and, 
like Manes, he added his own. 

In the I2th and I3th centuries, as it would appear, 
there sprang up and took a regular shape, first among the 
Talmudist Jews,^ the system of those modern doctors 
who have thought fit to class the various passages of 
holy Scripture under various orders of inspiration, and 
to reduce the divine inspiration to more or less natural 
proportions. It was under the double influence of the 
Aristotelian philosophy, and of the theology of the 
Talmud, that the Jews of the middle ages, differing much 
in this from the ancient Jews,^ imagined this theory. 
That was the time of the Solomon Jarchis, the David 
Kimchis, the Averroeses, the Aben-Ezras, the Joseph 
Albos ; and above all oi 3Ioses Maimonides, that Spanissh 
Jew who has been called the eagle of the doctors. 
Maimonides, borrowing the vague terms of the peripate- 
tic philosophy, taught that prophecy is not an exclusive 
product of the action of the Holy Ghost. Just, says he, 
as, if the intellectus agens (the intellectual influence that 
is in man) associate itself more intimately with reason, 
there results from it the secta sapientuni spcculatorum ; 
and as, if that agent operates more on the imagination, 
there results from it the sccta polUkonuu, legisiatorum, 
dimnatorum, et prccstigiatorum ; so also, when this 

1 Acta concilii Constantinop., ii. 65, 71, ajnui Ilarduin. Acta 
Concil., toiu. iii. p. }{7-!iJ). 

2 Soe J()se])lius agt. Apion. lib. i. c. 7, ^\ and Philo, cd Ilaoachel, 
p. 515, and p. 918. 



LATER IMPUGNERS OF DIVINE INSPIRATION. ] kS 

superior principle exercises its action in a more perfect 
manner on those two faculties of the soul at once, the 
result is the secfa prophefanim. Almost all the modem 
Jewish doctors have adopted the ideas of Maimonides; 
and there, also, seems to have originated Schleiermacher's 
modern system of inspiration. It is in starting from 
these principles that the doctors have admitted several 
degrees of inspiration in the prophets. Of these, 
Maimonides reckoned sometimes eight, sometimes 
eleven, Joseph Albo reduced them to four, and Abar- 
banel to three. They applied these distinctions of dif- 
ferent degrees of inspiration to the division of the Old 
Testament into Laic, Prophets^ and Hagiographa {t-'t 
=-:t:", =-s-::.) The kethuhim^ according to him, had 
not received the prophetic spirit (rs-u t^-~), but only 
the Holy Spirit (-—r: r— ), Avhich, according to him, 
was no more than a human faculty, by means of which 
a man pronounced words of wisdom and holiness.^ 

The modem German school of the adversaries of in- 
spiration, seems accordingly to be a mere reproduction 
of the theory of the rabbins of the 13th century, or a 
borrowing from the Talmudist doctors of our own days. 

In the 16th century, Socinus^ and Castellio^ main- 
tained that the sacred wnters sometimes show a failure 
of memory, and might err on subjects of slight impor- 
tance. 

In the \7tk century, three orders of adversaries, ac- 
cording to the celebrated Turretine,* combated inspira- 
tion. These were, besides the infidels properly so-called 
{atheos et gentiles) : 1. the fanatics {enthusiasts), who 
charged Scripture with imperfection in order to exalt 
their own particular revelations ; 2. those of the Pope's 
sect (pontijicii). who scrupled not, says he, to betray 
the cause of Christianity by alleging the corruption of 
the original text (fontium), in order to exalt their Yul- 

» Mosis Maimonides, More Nebuchim, part ii. c. 37, et 45. Ru- 
delbach (ut ^upra) p. 53. 

* De Author. Script. 3 in Dialogia. 

* Theol. Elenct., loc. 2, quaest. 5. 



144 LATER IMPUGNERS OF DIVINE INSPIRATION. 

gate translation ; 3. The rationalists of different classes 
y.ihertini)^ who, without going out of the Church, un- 
ceasingly attempted to shake the authority of the Scrip- 
tures, by pointing to difficult passages and apparent 
contradictions (acro^cc xai svavriofpavr,). 

In the latter half of the 18th century^ this last class 
of adversaries became very numerous in Germany. 
Semler gave the first impulsion to what he called the 
liberal interpretation of the Scriptures ; he rejected all 
inspiration, denied all prophecy, and treated all miracle 
as allegory and exaggeration.-^ Ammon, more lately, 
laid down positive rules for this impious manner of ex- 
plaining the miraculous facts.^ The writings of a legion 
of doctors no less daring, Paulus, Gabler, Schuster, 
Eestig, and many others, abound in practical applica- 
tions of these principles. Eichhorn, more recently still, 
has reduced into system the rationalist doctrine of 
prophecy.^ De Wette, in his Preliminary Manual^ 
appears not to see any true prediction in the prophets, 
and not to find any difference between those of Israel 
and those of the Pagan nations, beyond the spirit of 
morality and sincerity w^hich characterises monotheism, 
and which, says he, purified Hebrew prophecy, while it 
w^as wanting to the seers among the pagans.* Hug, in 
his Introduction to the New Testament Scriptures,^ no- 
w^here speaks of inspiration. Michaelis admits it for a 
part of the Scriptures, and rejects it for the other. So 
did John Leclerc in the last century.* Rosenmiiller is 
still more wavering in his sentiments. 

Of late years, however, there have been German di- 

1 Preface to Schulteiib's Compendium, on the Proverbs, by Vogel. 
Halle, 1769, p. 5. 

2 De interpret, narrationum mirabil. N. N. (at the beginning of bis 
Erncsti.) 

3 Einleitung in das alto Testament; 4 edit,, Goetting., 18*24, torn. 
iv. ]), 4,5. 

* Zweyte Verbcsserte Auflage. Berlin 18*22, p. 276. Lehrbuch. 
Aninerkunpcn. 

'* I'.inloitiing, &c., 2d edit. 1821. 

"Sentiments de quelquea thcologiens de Holland. Lett. XT. XII. 
La C'hamb., Trait6 de la Religion, torn. iv. p. 159, and tho following. 



TESTIMONY OP CHRISTIAN ANTIQUITY. 145 

vines more reverentially inclined, who have admitted dif- 
ferent degrees of inspiration in the different parts of the 
Scriptures ; by distinguishing the passages which do not 
relate, say they, to salvation ; and making bold to see in 
them, as Socinus and Castellio did of old, slips of 
memory, and errors, on subjects which, in their eyes, 
seemed of little importance. 

Among the English, too, there have been seen, of late 
years, persons otherwise respectable, who have allowed 
themselves to range the sentences of God's AVord under 
different classes of inspiration. 

XLY. Can many illustrious doctors of the Church be 
mentioned as maintaining the plenary inspiration of the 
Scriptures ? 

It is the uniform doctrine of the whole Church 
down to the days of the Reformation. 

" Hardly," says Eudelbach, " is there a single point 
with regard to which there reigned, in the eight first 
ages of the Church, a greater or more cordial unani- 
mity."^ 

To the reader who wishes to consult these testimonies 
of history, we recommend the dissertation lately pub- 
lished on this subject by the learned doctor of Glogau, 
already mentioned. The author, commencing with a 
review of the first eight hundred years of the Christian 
era, establishes the following principles there, by very 
numerous quotations from the Greek and Latin fa- 
thers. 

] . The ancient Church, with one unanimous voiCT3, 
teaches that all the canonical writings of the Old and 
New Testaments are given by the Holy Spirit of 
God ; and it is on this sole foundation (and indepen- 
dently of the fragmentary information that human im- 

1 Kaum ist irgend ein Punct, worUber im AUerthume eine gros- 
sere und freudigere Einstimmigkeit herrsclite. (Zeitschrift von 
Rudelbach und Guerike, 1840, Ist vol. p. 1-47. Die lehre von der 
Inspiration der Leiligen Schrift, mit Beriicksichtigung der neuesten 
Untersuchungen darliber, von Schleiermacher, Twesten und Steu- 
del.) 



146 OPINIONS OF THE ANCIENT CHURCH. 

perfection may acquire from them) that the Church 
founded her faith on the perfection of the Scriptures. 

2. The ancient Church, following out this first prin- 
ciple, no less firmly maintains the infallibility of the 
Scriptures as their sufficiency (avrd^xsia,v) and their 
plenitude. She attributes to their sacred authors not 
only axiopistia, to wit, a fully deserved credibility, 
but also autopisiia., to wit, a right to be believed, inde- 
pendently of their circumstances or of their personal 
qualities, and on account of the infallible and celestial 
authority which caused them to speak. 

3. The ancient Church, viewing the whole Scripture 
as an utterance, on the part of God, addressed to man, 
and dictated by the Holy Ghost, has ever maintained 
that there is nothing erroneous, nothing useless, no- 
thing superfluous there ; and that in this divine work, 
as in that of creation, one may always recognise, amid 
the richest plenty, the greatest and the wisest economy. 
Every word there will be found to have its object, its 
point of view, its sphere of efficacy. " Nihil otiosinn^ 
nee sine signo, neque sine argumento apud eum." — {Ire- 
nwus) ; rrav o^j/jja ... I^yai^o/Msvov ro savrov spyov. — {Ori- 
gen.) It is in vigorously estabhshing and defending 
both these characters of the Scriptures, that the ancient 
Church has shown the elevated and profound idea she 
entertained of their divine inspiration. 

4. The ancient Church has always maintained that 
the doctrine of holy Scripture is the same throughout, 
and that the Spirit of the Lord gives utterance in every 
part of it to one and the same testimony. She vigo- 
rously opposed that science, falsely so called (1 Tim. 
vi. 20), which even in the first ages of her history, had 
taken a regular shape in the doctrines of the Gnostics, 
and which, daring to impute imperfection to the Old 
Testament, made it appear that there were contradic- 
tions between one apostle and another apostle, where 
there were really none. 

5. The ancient Church thought that inspiration ought 
'-'hiefly to be viewed, it is true, as a passive state, butafl 



INSPIRATION NOT ECSTASY. 147 

a state iii which the human faculties, far from being 
EXTINGUISHED OF Set aside bj the action of the Holy 
Ghost, were exalted by his virtue, and filled with his 
light. She has often compared the soul of the prophets 
and of the apostles to " a stringed instrument, which the 
Holy Ghost put in motion, in order to draw out of it 
the divine harmonies of life." — (^Athenagoras-Y " ^^hat 
they had to do, was simply to submit themselves to the 
powerful action of the Holy Ghost, so that, touched by 
his celestial influence, the harp, though human, might 
reveal :o us the knowledge of the mysteries of heaven." — 
{Justin Martpr.Y But, in their view, this harp, en- 
tirely passive as it was as respects the action of God, 
was the heart of a man, the soul of a man, the under- 
standing of a man, renewed by the Holy Ghost, and 
filled Avith divine life. 

6. The ancient Church, while it maintained that there 
was this continued action on the part of the Holy Ghost 
in the composition of the Scriptures, strenuously re- 
pelled the false notions which certain doctors, particu- 
larly among the Montanists, sought to propagate re- 
specting the activity of the Spirit of God, and the pas- 
siveness of the spirit of man in divine inspiration ; as 
if the prophet, ceasing to have the mastery of his senses, 
had been in the state which the pagans attributed to 
their sibyls (/xav/a or ixoracs/). While the Cataphry- 
gians held that an inspired man, under the powerftil 
influence of the divine virtue, loses his senses (excidit 
sensii, adumhratus, silicet, mrtute diviiio),^ the ancient 
Church maintained, on the contrary, that the prophet 

DOES NOT SPEAK IX A STATE OF ECSTASY (non loquitUJ 

in sx.ffrd(jsh)^ and that one may distinguish by this trait 
false prophets from the true. This was the doctrine 
held by Origen against Celsus (lib. vii. c. 4) ; as also 



' Legatio pro Christianis, c. 9. 

2 Ad Graecos cobortatio, c. 8. 

3 Tertullian adv. Marcion. lib. iv. cb. 22. 

* Hieronym., Proem, in Nahum. Praefat. in Habak. in E^aiam. 
Epipban. adv. h^ereses, lib. ii. Hseres., 48, c. 3. 



148 OPINIONS OF THE ANCIENT CHURCH. 

of Miltiades, of Tertullian, of Epiphanius, of Chry 
sostom, of Basil, and of Jerome, against the Mon- 
tanists. 

7. The ancient Church in her endeavours, by means 
of OTHER DEFINITIONS, which we shall not indicate here, 
to give greater clearness to the idea of divine inspira- 
tion, and to disentangle it from the dilEculties with which 
it was sometimes obscured, still further showed how 
much she cherished this doctrine. 

8. The ancient Church thought that if the name of 
action on the part of God is to be applied to inspira- 
tion, it must be understood to extend to words as well 
as to things. 

9. The ancient Church, by her constant mode op 
quoting the Scriptures, in order to the establishment 
and defence of her doctrines ; by her manner, too, of 
EXPOUNDING and commenting on them ; and, in fine, 
by the use which she recommends all Christians, with- 
out exception, to make of them as a privilege and a 
duty; the ancient Church, by these three habitual 
practices, shows, still more strongly, if it be possible, 
than she could have done by direct declarations, how 
profoundly attached she was to the doctrine of a verbal 
inspiration. 

And it is not only by her exposition of the TVord 
that the ancient Church shows us to what point she 
held the entire inspiration of the Scriptures, as an in- 
controvertible axiom; she will show you this still more 
strongly, if you will follow her while she is engaged in 
RECONCILING THE apparent contradictions sometimes 
presented by the Gospel narratives. After having 
made an essay of some explanation, she does not insist 
upon it ; but hastens to conclude, that whatever be its 
validity, there necessarily exists some method of recon- 
ciling those passages, and that the difficulty is only ap- 
parent, because the cause of that difficulty lies in our 
ignorance, and not in Scripture. " \yhether it be so, 
or otherwise (she says with Julius Africanus), it matters 
not, the Gospel remains entirely true (ri /ji^evroi svayyi- 



RUDELBACH AND ST JEROME. 149 

Xiov TavTug dXrjhvn) !^ This is her invariable conclu- 
sion as to the perfect solubility of all the difficulties 
that one can present to her in the Word of God. 

10. The ancient Church was so strongly attached to 
the doctrine of the personality of the Holy Spirit, and 
of his sovereign action in the composition of the whole 
Scriptures, that she made no difficulty in admitting at 
one and the same time the greatest variety and the 
GREATEST LiBKRTY in the phenomena, in the occasions, 
in the persons, in the characters, and in all the external 
circumstances, under the concurrence of which that 
work of God was accomplished. At the same time 
that she owned with St Paul, that in all the operations 
of this Spirit, it is one and the self-same Spirit that 
divideth to every man severally as he will (1 Cor, xii. 
11), she equally admitted that in the work of divine in- 
spiration, the divine causation was exercised amid a 
large amount of liberty, as respects human manifesta- 
tions. And be it carefully remarked, that you will 
nowhere find, in the ancient Church, a certain class of 
doctors adopting one of these points of view (that of 
the divine causation and sovereignty), and another 
class of doctors attaching themselves exclusively to an- 
other (that of human personality, and of the diversity 
of the writer's occasions, affections, intelligence, style, 
and other circumstances), " If this were so," says 
Rudelbach, " one might justly accuse us of having our- 
selves forced the solution of the problem, instead of 
faithfully exhibiting the views of the ancient Church." 
But no ; on the contrary, you will often see one and 
the same author exhibit, at once and without scruple, 
both of these points of view : the action of God and the 
persc^ality of man. This is what we see, for example, 
abundantly in Jerome, who, even when speaking of the 
specialties of the sacred writers, never abandons the 
idea of a word introduced by God into their minds. 

» In his letter to Aristides, on the agreement of the Gospels that 
relate the two genealogies of Jesus Christ.— (Euseb., Hist. Eccl. 
lib. i. 0. 7 ) 



150 OPINIONS OF THE ANCIENT CHURCH. 

This we farther remark in Irenseus, who, while he in- 
sists more than any one else on the action of God in the 
inspiration of the Scriptures, is the first of the fathers of the 
Church that relates in detail the personal circumstances 
of the Evangelists. This is what you will find again in 
St Augustine; this is what you will see even in the father 
of Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius of Cassarea, who 
gives so many details on the four authors of the Gos- 
pels, and who, nevertheless, professes the most rigorous 
principles on the plenary inspiration of the Canonical 
Scriptures. 

11. The ancient Church shows us more completely 
still, by two other traits, the idea she had formed of di- 
vine inspiration, by the care she took, on the one hand, 
TO FIX THE RELATIONS which the doctrine of divine in- 
spiration bore to the doctrine of the gifts of grace ; and, 
on the other, to exhibit the proofs of inspiration. 

In fine, although the ancient Church presents this 
spontaneous (ungesuchte) and universal agreement in 
the doctrine of inspiration, we must not imagine that 
this great phenomenon is attached, as some have been 
fain to say, to some particular system of theology, or 
may be explained by that system. No more must we 
regard this wonderful agreement as the germ of a theory 
that was to establish it, at a later period in the Church. 
No. The very assertions of an opposite opinion which, 
from time to time, made themselves heard on the part 
of the heretics of the first centuries, and the nature of 
the REPLIES that were put forth by the ancient Church, 
clearly demonstrate, on the contrary, that this doctrine 
was deeply rooted in the Church's conscience. Every 
time that the fathers, in defending any truth by passages 
from Scripture, succeeded so far as to drive their a'dver- 
saries into the impossibility of defending tliemselves, 
otherwise than by denying the full inspiration of the 
divine testimonies, the Church thought tlie question was 
decided. The adversary was tried ; he had no more to 
say for himself ; lie denied the Scripture to be rhe Word 
of God ! Wliat more remained to be done, but to com- 



HUMAN AUTHORITIES THAT MIGHT BE ADDUCED. 1.51 

pel him to look his own ill-favoured argument in the 
face, and to say to him, See what you have come to ! 
as one would bid a man who has disfigured himself, look 
at himself in a glass ? And this the fathers did. 

Such are facts of the case ; such is the voice of the 
Church. 

We had at first brought together, with the design of 
giving them here, a long series of passages, taken first 
from Irenfeus,^ Tertullian,^ Cyprian,^ Origen,* Chrysos- 
tom,'' Justin Martyr,^ Epiphanius,^ Augustine,® Atha- 
nasius,^ Hilary,^° 13asil the Great,^ and Gregory the 
Great," Gregory of Nyssa,^^ Theodoret,^* Cyril of 
Alexandria ;^^ then, the most revered fathers of after 
centuries ; and, finally, the most holy doctors of the 
Reformation.-^^ But we soon perceived that all these 
names, were we to give them by themselves, would seem 
nothing better than an idle appeal to the authority of 

» Adrers. Haereses, lib. ii. c. 47. Lib. iii. c. 11. Lib. iv. c. 34. 

2 De anima, c. 28. Advers. Marcion. lib. iv. c. 22. De Praescript. 
advers. haeret., c. 25. Advers. Hermog. c. 22. 

3 De Opere et eleemos. p. 197-201. Adv. Quirin., Adv. Judaeos, 
praefat. 

* Horn, xxxix. in Jerem (quoted here ch. VL sect. 1.) Homil. iL 
in eumd. (cap. xix. & 1.) Horail. xxv. in Matth. Ejii«(]em Philo- 
calia, lib. iv. Commentar. in Matth. p. 227-428, (edit. Huet.) Ho- 
mil. xxvii. in Numer. — in Levit., homil. v. 

5 Homil. xiix. in Joan. Homil. xl., in Joan. v. Homil. ix., in 
2 Tim. iv. Serm. 53. de utilit. lect. Script. Serm 3, de Lazaro. 

6 Apol. i. c. 53, and 35, 50, 5J. Dial. cont. Tryph., cap. 7. Ad 
Graecos cohort., c. 8. 

7 2CtTo/j^ xiyos in(i irirrws. De doctrin. Christi. lib. ii. c. 9. De 
Pastor., cap. 2. E})ist. xlii. 

8 Epist. xcvii. (ad Hieronym.) De unitate Ecclesiae. c. iii. t. ix., 
p. 341. (Paris, 1694.) 

9 Contra Gentvs, t. i. p. 1. De Incamat. Christi. (Parisiis ]f)27.) 

10 Ad Constant. Auir., p. 244. De Trinit. lib. 8. (Parisiis, 1652.) 
" Comment, in Isaiam, t. i. p. 379. (Ed. Bened.) Homil. xxix. 

advers. calumniantes S. Trinit. In Ethicis regni xvi. Ixxx., cap. 22, 

'^Moralia in Job, praefat., c. i. 

" Dialog, de anima et resurrectione, t. i. edit. Grsecolat, p. 639. 
De cognit. Dei cit. ab. Euthymio in Panoplia, t. 8. 

" Dial. i. 'At{itt. Dial. ii. 'Anyx'^T. In Exod., Qu, xxvi. In Gen., 
Quest, xlv. 

15 Lib. vii. cont. Jul. Glaphyrorum in Gen., lib. ii. 

'«See Lardner. vol. ii. p. 172, 488, 475. Haldane, The Inspiration 
of the Holv Scriptures, p. 167 to 176. 

io 



152 HUMAN AUTHORITIES THAT MIGHT BE ADDUCED. 

men ; and were we to give them along with the passages 
referred to, in full, we should nm into an excessive 
multiplication of words. 

We shall proceed, therefore, with a careful examina- 
tion of the difficulties and the systems that are opposed 
to the doctrine of a plenary inspiration. Those difficul- 
ties constitute what are objections, and those systems 
what are rather evasions. The two next chapters we 
shall devote to the study of both. 



EXAMINATION OF OBJECTIONS. 153 



CHAPTER lY. 

EXAMINATION OF OBJECTIONS. 

It is objected that the fallibility of the translators of the 
Bible, renders the infallibility of the original text illusory ; 
that the fact of the apostles having availed themselves of 
the merely human version made by the Seventy, renders 
their divine inspiration more than questionable. Ob- 
jections are groimded on the various readings presented 
by diiferent manuscripts, on the imperfections observed 
in the reasonings and in the doctrines, and on errors 
discovered in matters of fact. Objectors tell us that 
the laws of nature, now better understood than formerly, 
gire the lie to certain representations of the sacred au- 
thors. Finally, we are told to look to what objectors 
are pleased to call the admissions made by St Paul. To 
these dilficulties "we proceed to reply, taking them one 
after another ; and we can afterwards examine some of the 
theories, by the help of which some have sought to rid 
themselves of the doctrine of a plenary inspiration. 

SECTION I. 

THE TRANSLATION'S. 

The first objection may be stated thus. It is some- 
times said to us, You assert that the inspiration of the 
Scriptures extended to the very words of the original 
text ; but wherefore all this verbal exactness of the Holy 
Word, seeing that, after all, the greater number of 
Christians can make use of such versions only as are 



154 FIRST OBJECTION IS NO OBJECTION. 

more or less inexact ? Thus, then, the privilege of such 
an inspiration is lost to the Church of modern times ; 
for you "vvill not ventiire to say that any translation is 
inspired. 

This is a difficulty which, on acount of its insignifi- 
cance, we felt at first averse to noticing ; but we cannot 
avoid doing so, being assured that it has obtained some 
currency among us, and some credit also. 

Our first remark on this objection must be, that it is 
not one at all. It does not bear against the ,^c^ of the 
verbal inspiration of the Scriptures ; it only contests the 
advantages of that inspiration. With regard to the 
greater number of readers, it says, the benefit of such an 
intervention on the part of God, would be lost ; because, 
instead of the infallible words of the original, they never 
can have better than the fallible words of a translation. 
But no man is entitled to deny a fact, because he does 
not at first perceive all the use that may be made of it ; 
and no man is entitled to reject a doctrine for no better 
reason than that he has not perceived, its utility. All 
the expressions, for example, and all the letters of the 
Ten Commandments were certainly written by the finger 
of God, from the afepk with which they commence, to 
the caph with which they end ; yet, would any one 
venture to say that the credibility of this miraculous 
factj is weakened by most unlettered readers, at the pre- 
sent day, being under the necessity of reading the 
Decalogue in some translation ? No one would dare to 
say so. It must be acknowledged, then, that this ob- 
jection, without directly attacking the dogma which we 
defend, only questions its advantages : these, it tells us, 
are lost to us, in the operation of translating from the 
original, and in that metamorphosis disappear. 

We proceed, then, to show how even this assertion, 
when reduced to these last terms, rests on no good 
foundation. 

The divine word which the Bible reveals to us, passes 
through four successive forms before reaching us in a 
translation. First, it was from all eternity in the mind 



DIFFERENCE OF ORIGINAL AND TRANSLATED TEXT. 155 

of" God. Next, it was passed by Him into the mind of 
man. In the third place, under the operation of the 
Holy Ghost, and by a mysterious process, it passed from 
the prophets' thoughts, into the types and symbols of an 
articulate language ; it took shape in words. Finally, 
after having undergone this first translation, alike im 
portant and inexplicable, men have reproduced and 
counter- chalked it, by a new translation, in passing it 
from one human lanofuasfe into another human lan- 
guage. Of these four operations, the three first are 
divine : the fourth alone is human and fallible. Shall it 
be said, that because the last is human, the divinity of 
the three former should be a matter of indifference to us? 
Mark, however, that between the third and the fourth — 
I mean to say, between the first translation of the 
thought by the sensible signs of a human language, and 
the second translation of the words by other words — the 
difference is enormous. Between the doubts that may 
cleave to us respecting the exactness of the versions, 
and those with which we should be racked \Yith respect 
to the correctness of the original text (if not inspired 
even in its language), the distance is infinite. It is said ; 
of what consequence is it to me that the third operation 
is effected by the Spirit of God, if the last be accom- 
plished only by the spirit of man ? In other words, 
what avails it to me that the primitive language be in- 
spired, if the translated version be not so ? But people 
forget, in speaking thus, that we are infinitely more 
assured of the exactness of the translators, than we could 
be of that of the original text, in the case of all the ex- 
pressions not being given by God. 

Of this, however, we may become perfectly convinced, 
by attending to the five following considerations : — 

1 . The operation by which the sacred writers express 
■with words the mind of the Holy Ghost, is, we have 
said, itself a rendering not of words by other words, 
but of divine thoughts by sensible symbols. Now this 
first translation is an infinitely nicer matter, more mys- 
terious and more liable to error (if God puts not his 



156 WHAT IS THE BEST TRANSLATION. 

hand to it) than the operation can be afterwards, by 
which we should render a Greek word of that primitive 
text, by its equivalent in another tongue. In order to 
a man's expressing exactly the thought of God, it is 
necessary, if he be not guided in his language from 
above, that he have thoroughly comprehended it in iis 
just measure, and in the whole extent and depth of its 
meaning. But this is by no means necessary in the 
case of a mere translation. The divine thought being 
already incarnated, as it were, in the language of the 
sacred text, what remains to be done in translation is 
no longer the giving of it a body, but only the changing 
of its dress, making it say in French what it had already 
said in Greek, and modestly substituting for each of its 
words an equivalent word. Such an operation is compa- 
ratively very inferior, very immaterial, without mystery, 
and infinitely less subject to error than the preceding. 
It even requires so little spirituality, that it may be 
performed to perfection by a trustworthy pagan who 
should possess in perfection a knowledge of both lan- 
guages. The version of an accomplished rationalist 
who desires to be no more than a translator, I could 
better trust than that of an orthodox person and a saint, 
who should paraphrase the text, and undertake to pre- 
sent it to me more complete or more clear in his French 
than he found it in the Greek or in the Hebrew of the 
original. And let no one be surprised at this assertion; 
it is justified by facts. Thus, is not De Wette's trans- 
lation, among the Germans, preferred at the present 
day to that even of the great Luther ? At least, is there 
not greater confidence felt in having the mind of the 
Holy Ghost in the lines of the Basel professor than in 
those of the great reformer ; because the former has 
always kept very close to the expressions of his text, 
as a man of learning subject to the rules of philology 
alone; while the hitter seems at times to have momen- 
tarily endeavoured after something more, and sought to 
make himself interpreter as well as transhitor ? The 
more, then, one reflects on this first consideration, the 



GUARANTEES AGAINST ERRORS OF TRANSLATION, 157 

more immeasurable ought tlie difference to appear 
between these two orders of operations ; to wit, between 
the transhition of the divine thoughts into the words of 
a human language, and the translation of the same 
thoughts into the equivalent terms of another language. 
No longer, therefore, be it said, " What avails it to me, 
if the one be human, that the other is divine?" 

2. A second character by which we perceive how 
different these two operations must be, and by which 
the making of our versions will be seen to be infinitely 
less subject to the chances of error than the original 
text (assuming that to be uninspired)^ is, that Avhile 
the work required by our translations is done by a great 
many men of every tongue and country, capable of de- 
voting their whole time and care to it — by men who 
have from age to age controlled and checked each other, 
and who have mutually instructed and perfected each 
other — the original text, on the contrary, behoved to 
be written at a given moment, and by a single man. 
With that man there was none but his God to put him 
right if he made a mistake, and to supply him with 
better expressions if he had chosen imperfect ones. If 
God, therefore, did not do this, no one could have done 
it. And if that man gave a bad rendering of the mind 
of the Holy Ghost, he had not, like our translators, 
friends to warn, predecessors to guide, successors to 
correct, nor months, years, and ages in which to review 
and consummate his work. It was done by one man, 
and done once for all. This consideration, then, fur- 
ther shows how much more necessary the intervention 
of the Holy Ghost was to the sacred authors than to 
their translators. 

3. A third consideration, which ought also to lead 
us to the same conclusion, is, that while all the trans- 
lators of the Scriptures were hterate and laborious 
persons, and versed in the study of language, the sacred 
authors, on the contrary, were, for the most part, igno- 
rant men, without literary cultivation, without the habit 
of writing their own tongue, and liable, from that very 



158 ORIGINAL TEXT REMAINS WITH U9. 

circumstance, if they expressed fallibly the divine reve- 
lation, to give us an infallible thought in a faulty way. 
4. A fourth very powerful consideration, which will 
make one feel still more sensibly the immense difference 
existing between the sacred writers and their transla- 
tors, is, that whereas the thought from God passed like 
a flash of lightning before the soul of the prophet ; 
whereas this thought could nowhere be found again upon 
earth, except in the rapid expression which was then 
given to it by the sacred writer ; whereas, if he have ex- 
pressed it ill, you know not where to go in search of its 
prototype in order to recover the thought meant to be 
conveyed by God in its purity ; whereas, if he have 
made a mistake, his blunder is for ever irreparable ; it 
must last longer than heaven and earth, it has blemished 
the eternal book remedilessly, and nobody on earth can 
correct it ; — it is quite otherwise with translators. These, 
on the contrary, have always the divine text at hand, so 
as to be corrected and re-corrected, according to the 
eternal type, until they have become an exact counter- 
part of it. The inspired word leaves us not ; we need 
not to go in search of it to the third heaven ; it is still 
upon the earth, just as God himself first dictated it to 
us. You may thus devote ages to its study, in order that 
the human process of our translation may be subjected to 
its immutable truth. You can now, afrer the lapse of 
a hundred and thirty years, correct Osterwald and 
Martin, by means of a closer comparison of them with 
their infallible standard ; after the lapse of three hun- 
dred and seventeen years, you can correct' the work of 
Luther ; after that, of fourteen hundred and forty years, 
that of St Jerome. God's pliraseology is still liefore us, 
with which to confront our modern versions, as dictated 
by God himself, in Hel)rew or in (ireek, on the day of 
its being revealed ; and, with our dictionaries in your 
hand, you may, age after age, return to tlie examina- 
tion of the infallible expression which it lias been his 
good plea<ure to give to the divine thought, until you 
become assured that the language of the niodirn ones 



DIFFERENCE IN THE RANGE OF CONJECTURES. 159 

has truly received the counter impression, and given 
you the most faithful fac-simile of it for your own use. 
Say no more then, "What avails it to me, that the one 
is divine since the other is human ? If you would have 
a bust of Napoleon, would you say to the sculptor, 
What avails it to me that your model has been moulded 
at St Helena on the very face of Bonaparte, seeing that, 
after all, your copy cannot have been so ? 

5. In fine, what further distinguishes the first expres- 
sion which the mind of God has received in the indi- 
vidual words of the sacred book, from its new expres- 
sion in one of our translations, is that, if you assume 
the words of the one to be as little inspired as those 
of the other, nevertheless, the range of conjectures 
which you might make on their possible faults would 
be, as respects the original text, a space without bounds 
and ever enlarging itself; while that same range, as 
respects the translations, is a very limited space, which 
is constantly diminishing the longer you remain in it. 

If some friend, returning from the East Indies, where 
your father has, at a great distance from you, breathed 
his last, were to bring you from him a last letter, written 
with his own hand, or dictated by him, word for word, 
in Bengalee, would that letter's being entirely from him 
be a matter of indifference to you, because you are not 
acquainted with the Bengalee language, and can read 
it only in a translation ? Don't you know that you can 
cause translations of it to be multiplied, until they leave 
you no more doubt of the original meaning than if you 
had been a Hindoo ? "Will you not allow, that after 
each of these new translations your uncertainties will 
be always growing less and less, until they cease to be 
appreciable, as is the case in arithmetic with those frac- 
tionary and convergent progressions, the last terms of 
which are equivalent to zero ; while, on the contrary, 
if the letter were not from your father himself, but 
from some stranger, who says he has only reproduced 
his thoughts, then you would find no limits to pos- 
fiible suppositions ; -nid your Mriccrfaintios. transported 



160 PLENARY INSPIRATION LIMITS DOUBT. 

into spheres new and boundless, would go on increas- 
ing the more you allowed your mind to dwell upon 
them; as is the case in arithmetic with those ascending 
progressions, the last terms of which represent infini 
tude. It is the same with the Bible. If I believe that 
God has dictated the whole of it, my uncertainties with 
respect to its translations are confined within a very 
narrow range ; and even in this range, in proportion as 
it is re-translated, the limits of doubt are constantly 
drawn in more closely. But if left to think, on the 
contrary, that God has not entirely dictated it, and that 
human infirmity may have had its share in it, where 
shall I stop in assuming that there may be errors ? I 
know not. The apostles were ignorant — shall I say, 
they were illiterate — they were Jews ; they had popu- 
lar prejudices; they judaized; they platonized; .... 
I know not where to stop. I will begin like Locke, 
and end like Strauss. I will first deny the personality 
of Satan, as a rabbinical prejudice; I will end with de- 
nying that of Jesus Christ, as another prejudice. Be- 
tween these two terms, in consequence, moreover, of 
the ignorance, on many points, to which the apostles 
were subject, I will proceed, as so many others have 
done, to admit, in spite of the letter of the Bible, and 
with the Bible in my hand, that there is no corruption 
in men, no personality in the Holy Ghost, no divinity 
in Jesus Christ, no expiation in his blood, no resurrec- 
tion of the body in the grave, no eternity in future 
punishments, no anger in God, no devil, no miracle, no 
damned souls, no hell. St Paul was orthodox, shall I 
say? as others have done; but he misunderstood his 
Master. Whereas, on the contrary, if all have been 
dictated by God in the original, and even to the smallest 
expression, *' to the least iota and tittle," who is the 
translator that could seduce me, by his labours, into 
any one of these negations, and make even the least 
of these truths disappear from my Bible? 

Accordingly, who now can fail to perceive the enor- 
mous distance interposed by all these considerations 



USE OF THE SEPTUAGINT IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. 1 6 1 

between those two texts (that of the Bible and that of the 
translations), as respects the importance of verbal in- 
spiration ? Between the passing of the thoughts of 
God into human words, and the simple turning of these 
words into other words, the distance is as wide as from 
heaven to earth. God was required for the one ; man 
sufficed for the other. Let it no longer be said, then, 
What would it avail to us that we have verbal inspira- 
tion in the one case, if we have not that inspiration in 
the other case ? for between these two terms, which some 
would put on an equality, the difference is almost in- 
finite. 



SECTION II. 

USE OF THE SEPTUAGINT TRAXSLATION. 

People insist and say, "We agree that the fact of these 
modem translations does not at all affect the question 
of the first inspiration of the Scriptures ; but we have 
much more to urge. The sacred authors of the New 
Testament, when they themselves quote the old Hebrew 
Scriptures in Greek, employ for that purpose the Greek 
translation^ called that oi the Seventy^ executed at Alex- 
andria two centuries and a half before Jesus Christ. 
Now, no one among the modems will dare to affirm 
(as was done in former times) that the Alexandrine in- 
terpreters were inspired. Would a man any more dare 
to contend that that version, still human at the time of 
Jesus Christ, acquired, by the sole fact of the apostolic 
quotations, a divinity which it did not previouslv pos- 
sess ? Would not this strange allegation resemble that 
of the Council of Trent, when it pronounced to be divine 
apocryphal writings, which the ancient Church re- 
jected from the canon, and which St Jerome called 
'•*' fables^ and a medley of gold and clay ; " ^ or when it 

1 Caveat omnia apocrypha .... Sciat multa his admixta vitiosa^ 
et grandi3 esse prudentiae aurum in luto quaerere. See Epist. ad 



162 USE OF THE SEPTUAGINT IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. 

pronounced that translation by St Jerome to be au- 
thentic, which, at first, in the opinion of St Jerome 
himself, and thereafter in that of the Church for above a 
thousand years, was no more than a human work, re- 
spectable, no doubt, but imperfect? Would it not 
further resemble the silly infallibility of Sixtus V., who 
declared his edition of 1590 to be authentic ; or that of 
his successor, Clement VIII., who, finding the edition of 
Sixtus V. intolerably incorrect, suppressed it in 1592, in 
order to sul)Stitute in its place another very different, 
and yet still more authentic?'^ 

Here we gladly recall this difficulty ; because, like 
many others, when more closely examined, it converts 
the objections into arguments. 

No more is required, in fact, than to study the manner 
in which the apostles employ ttie Septuagint, in order 
to see in it a striking sign of the verbal inspiration under 
which they wrote. 

Were a prophet to be sent by God in our day to the 
churches speaking the French tongue, how shall it be 
thought he would act in quoting the Scriptures ? He 
would do so in French no doubt ; but according to what 
version ? As Osterwald and Martin's are those most 
extensively circulated, he would probably make his 
quotations in the words of one or other of them, in all 
cases where their translation should seem to him suffi- 
ciently exact. But also, notwithstanding our habitual 
practice and his, he would take care to abandon both 
those versions, and translate in his own Avay, as often as 
the thought intended to be conveyed by the original did 
not seem to him to be rendered with sufficient fidelity. 
Nay, he would sometimes even do more. In order to 
our being enabled to comprehend more fully in what 
sense he meant to make for us the application of such 

Lajtam. Prolog. Gal eat. sive Praefat. ad. lib. Rejrum. Symbol. 
Ruflfini, torn. ix. p. 186. See Lardner, vol. v. p. 18- •22. 

1 See Korholt. Do Variia S. Soripturse editionibiis, p. 110-251. 
Thoinaa James, Bellum Papale, eive Concordia Discors Sixti V. etc., 
Lond. 1600. IIainilton''s Introduction to the Reading of the He- 
brew Scrip turcH, p. 1G3, 166. 



USE OF THE SEPTUAGINT IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. 163 

or such a Scripture, he would paraphrase the passage 
quoted, and in citing it, follow neither the letter of the 
orijrinal text nor that of the translations. 

This is precisely what has been done by the sacred 
writers of the New Testament with respect to the Sep- 
tuagint. 

Although it was the universal practice of the Hellen- 
istic Jews, throughout the whole of the East, to read in 
their synagogues and to quote in their discussions the 
Old Testament according to that ancient version,^ the 
apostles show us the independence of the Spirit that 
guided them, by the three several methods they follow 
in their quotations. 

First, when the Alexandrine translators seem to 
them correct, they do not hesitate to conform to the 
recollections of their Hellenist auditors, and to quote the 
Septuagint version literatim and verbatim. 

Secondly, and this often occurs when dissatisfied with 
the work of the Seventy, they amend it, and make their 
quotations according to the original Hebrew, translating 
it more correctly. 

Thirdly, in fine, when they would point out more 
clearly in what sense they adduce such or such a decla- 
ration of the holy books, they paraphrase it in quoting 
it. It is then the Holy Ghost who, by their mouth, 
quotes himself, modifying at the same time the expres- 
sions which he had previously dictated to the prophets 
of his ancient people. One may compare, for example, 
Mic. V. 2 Avith Matt. ii. 6 ; Mai. iii. 1 with Matt, 
xi. 10 , Mark i. 2, and Luke vii. 27, &c. &c. 

The learned Home, in his " Introduction to the Cri- 
tical Study of the Bible" (vol. i. p. 503,) has ranged 
under five distinct classes, relatively to the Septuagint 
version, the quotations made in the New Testament 
from the Old. We do not here warrant all his distinc- 
tions, nor all his figures; but our readers will compre- 
hend the force of our argument, on our informing them 

1 The Talmud even forbids the translation of the Scriptures, ex- 
cept into Greek. (Talmud Megillah, fol. 86.) 

16 



164 THE VARIOUS READINGS. 

that that learned author reckons eighty-eight verbal 
quotations that agree with the Alexandrine translations; 
sixty-four more that are borrowed from them, but with 
some variations ; thirty-seven that adopt the same mean- 
ing with them without employing their words ; sixteen 
that differ from them in order to agree more nearly wdth 
the Hebrew ; and, finally, twenty that differ from both 
the Hebrew and the Septuagint, but in which the sacred 
authors have paraphrased the Old Testament, in order 
that the sense in which they quote it may be better 
understood. 

These numerical data will sufficiently enable the 
reader to form a just idea of the independence claimed 
by the Holy Ghost with regard to human versions, when 
he desired to quote, in the New Testament, that which 
he had previously caused to be WTitten in the Old. 
Accordingly, they not only answer the objection — they 
convert it into a testimony. 



SECTION in. . y 

THE VARIOUS READINGS. 

We must give up the translations, then, other opponents 
will say, and admit that they nowise affect the question 
of the primary inspiration of the original text. But in 
that very text there are numerous differences among the 
ancient manuscripts which our Churches consult, and on 
which our printed editions are based. Confronted with 
proofs of such a fact, what becomes of the doctrine of 
verbal inspiration, and what purpose can it serve ? 

Here, too, the answer is easy. We might say at once 
of the various readings of the manuscripts, what we 
have said of the translations : AVhy confound two 
orders of facts that are absolutely distinct: that of the 
first inspiration of the Scriptures, and that of the pre- 
sent integrity of the copies that have been made of 



TWO DIFFERENT QUESTIONS CONFOUNDED. 1 65 

them ? If it was God himself that dictated the letter of 
the sacred oracles, that is a fact past recall ; and no 
more can the copies made of them, than the translations 
given to us of them, undo that first act. 

When a fact is once consummated, nothing that hap- 
pens subsequently can efface it from the history of the 
past. There are here, then, two questions which we 
must carefully distinguish. Was the whole of Scrip- 
ture divinely inspired ? — this is the first question ; 
it is that with w4iich we have now to do. Are the 
copies made of it many centuries afterwards by doc- 
tors and monks correct*? or are they not correct ? — that 
is the second question. This last can nowise affect the 
other. Don't proceed, then, to subject the former, by a 
strange piece of inattention, to the latter ; they are in- 
dependent of each other. A book is from God, or it is 
not from God. In the latter case, it were idle for me 
to transcribe it a thousand times exactly — I should not 
thereby render it divine ; and in the former case, 1 
should in vain take a thousand incorrect copies ; — 
neither folly nor unfiiithfulness on my part, can undo 
the fact of its having been given by God. The Deca- 
logue, yet once more we repeat it, was entirely written 
by the finger of Jehovah on two tables of stone ; but if 
the manuscripts that give it to me at the present day pre- 
sent some various readings, this second fact would not 
prevent the first. The sentences, words, and letters of 
the Teyi Commandments^ would not the less have been 
all engraven by God. Inspiration of the first text, in- 
tegrity of the subsequent copies — these are two orders 
of facts absolutely different, and separated from each 
other by thousands of stadia, and thousands of years. 
Beware, then, of confounding what logic, time, and 
space compel you to distinguish. 

It is by precisely a similar process of reasoning, that 
we reprove the indiscreet lovers of the apocryphal writ- 
ings. The ancient oracles of God, we tell them, were 
committed to the Jewish people, as the new oracles were 
committed afterwards to the Christian people. If, then, 



166 LOGICAL LIMITS OF THE OBJECTION. 

the Book of Maccabees was a merely human book in the 
days of Jesus Christ, a thousand decrees of the Christian 
Church could not have any such effect thereafter as that, 
in 1560, becoming what it had never been till then, it 
should be transubstantiated into a divine book. Did the 
prophets write the Bible with the words which human 
wisdom dictated, or with words given them by God ? 
— such is our question. But have they been faithfully 
copied from age to age, from manuscripts into manu- 
scripts ? — this is yours, perhaps. It is very important 
no doubt ; but it is entirely different from the first. Do 
not, then, confound what God has separated. 

It is true, no doubt, will people say, that the fidelity 
of one copy does not make the original divine, when it 
is not so ; and the incorrectness of another copy will 
not make it human, if it was not so. Accordingly, this 
is not what we maintain. The fact of the inspiration of 
the sacred text in the days of Moses, or the days of St 
John, cannot depend upon the copies which we shall 
have made of it in Europe and Africa, two or three 
thousand years after them ; but though the second of 
these facts does not destroy the first, it at least renders 
it illusory, by depriving it of its whole worth and 
utility. 

Now, then, mark to what the objection is confined. 
The question is no longer about the inspiration of 
the original text — the whole attack here is directed 
against its present integrity. It was first a question of 
doctrine : '* Is it declared in the Bible that the Bible is 
inspired even in its language ?" But it is no more now 
than a question of history, or of criticism : " Have the 
copyists copied faithfully ? are the manuscripts faith- 
ful ?" Accordingly, we might say nothing now on a 
position of which we are not here called upon to under- 
take the defence ; but the answer is easy ; I will say 
more — God has rendered it so triumphant that we will 
not restrain ourselves from giving it. Besides, the faith 
of simple minds has been so often disquieted on this sub- 
ject by a phantasmagoria of learning, that we consider 



god's care of his own word. 167 

it useful here to expose its hollowness. And, although 
tliis ohjection in some sort withdraws us from the 
field which we had traced out for our ourselves, we will 
follow it, for the purpose of answering it. 

No doubt, had this difficulty been presented to us in 
the days of Anthony Collins and the Free Thinkers^ 
we should not have been left without reply, hut we 
should have felt perhaps some embarrassment, because 
full light had not then been thrown upon the facts, and 
because the field of conjectures, as yet unexplored, re- 
mained undefined. AVe know the perplexities of the 
excellent Bengel on this question ; and we know that 
these led, first, to his laborious researches on the sacred 
text, and, next, to his pious wonder and gratitude at the 
preservation of that text. Of what use, one might 
have said, is the assurance that the original text was 
dictated by God eighteen hundred years ago, if I have 
no longer the certainty that the manuscripts of our 
libraries still present it to me in its purity, and if it be 
true (as we are assured) that the various readings of 
these rolls are at least thirty thousand in number? 

Such is the old objection : it was specious ; but now- 
a-days it is known, by all who have studied it, to be a 
mere illusion. The Rationalists themselves have ad- 
mitted that it can no longer be made, and must be 
given up. 

The Lord has watched miraculously over his TVord. 
This the facts of the case have demonstrated. 

In constituting as its depositaries, first, the Churches 
of the Jewish people, and then those of the Christian 
people, his providence had by this means to see to the 
faithful transmission of the oracles of God to us. It 
has done this ; and in order to the attainment of this 
result, it has put different causes in operation, of which 
we shall have again to speak afterwards. Late learned 
researches have thrown the clearest light on this great 
fact. Herculean labours have been bestowed, dui'ing 
the whole of the last century (particularly in its last 
half ) and the first part of this, on the task of bringing 



168 RESULT OF MODERN RESEARCHES. 

together all the various readings that eitlier the detailed 
examination of the manuscripts of holy Scripture pre- 
served in the different libraries of Europe, or the study 
of the most ancient versions, or the searching out of 
the innumerable quotations made from our sacred books 
in all the writings of the fathers of the Church, could 
furnish ; and this immense toil has ended in a result 
wonderful by its insignificance, and (shall I say ?) im- 
posing by its nullity. 

As respects the Old Testament, the indefatigable 
investigations and the four folios of Father Houbigant ; 
the thirty years' labours of John Henry Michaelis; above 
all, the great Critical Bible and the ten years' study of 
the famous Kennicott (who consulted five hundred and 
eighty -one Hebrew manuscripts) ; and, in fine. Professor 
Rossi's collection of six hundred and eighty manu- 
scripts ; — as respects the New Testament, the no less 
gigantic investigations of Mill, Bengel, Wetstein, and 
Griesbach (who consulted three hundred and thirty- 
five manuscripts for the Gospels alone) ; the latest 
researches of Nolan, Matthaei, Lawrence, and Hug ; 
above all, those of Scholz (with his six hundred and 
seventy-four manuscripts for the Gospels, his two hun- 
dred for the Acts, his two hundred and fifty-six for the 
Epistles of Paul, his ninety-three for the Apocalypse, 
(without reckoning his fifty-three Lectlonariu) : all these 
vast labours have so convincingly established the asto- 
nishing preservation of that text, copied nevertheless so 
many thousands of times (in Hebrew during thirty- 
three centuries, and in Greek during eighteen hundred 
years), that the hopes of the enemies of religion, in this 
quarter, have been subverted, and as JMichaelis has 
said, " They have ceased hencefortli to look for any thing 
from those critical researches which they at first so 
warmly recommended, because they expected discoveries 
from them that have never been made." ^ The learned 
Rationalist Eichhorn himself also owns that the dift'erent 

' Micbaelis, t. ii. p. 266. 



PROVES UNIMPORTANCE OF THE VARIATIONS. ] G9 

readings of the Hebrew manuscripts collected by Ken- 
nicott hardly offer sufficient interest to compensate for 
the trouble they cost ! ^ But these very misreckonings, 
and the absence of those discoveries, have proved a pre- 
cious discovery for the Church of God. She expected 
as much ; but she is delighted to owe it to the labour of 
her very adversaries. " In truth," says a learned man 
of our day, " but for those precious negative conclusions 
that people have come to, the direct result obtained 
from the consumption of so many men's lives in these 
immense researches may seem to amount to nothing ; 
and one may say that in order to come to it, time, 
talent, and learning have all been foolishly thrown 
away."^ But, as we have said, this result is immense in 
virtue of its nothingness, and all-powerful in virtue of 
its insignificance. When one thinks that the Bible has 
been copied during thirty centuries, as no book of man 
has ever been, or ever will be ; that it was subjected to 
all the catastrophes and all the captivities of Israel ; 
that it was transported seventy years to Babylon ; that 
it has seen itself so often persecuted, or forgotten, or 
interdicted, or burnt, from the days of the Philistines 
to those of the Seleucidas ; — when one thinks that, 
since the time of Jesus Christ, it has had to traverse 
the first three centuries of the imperial persecutions, 
when persons found in possession of the holy books 
were thrown to the wild beasts ; next the 7th, 8th, 
and 9th centuries, when false books, false legends, 
and false decretals, were everywhere multiplied ; the 
10th century, when so few could read, even among 
princes; the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries, when 
the use of the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue was 
punished Avith death, and when the books of the an- 
cient fathers were mutilated, when so many ancient 
traditions were garbled and falsified, even to the very 
acts of the emperors, and to those of the councils ; — 
then we can perceive how necessary it was that the 

1 Einleitun^, 2. Th. 8. 700. 
Wiseman's Discourses on the Relations, etc., ii. Disc. 10. 



170 INSIGNIFICANCE OP THE VARIATIONS 

providence of God should liave always put forth its 
mighty power, in order that, on the one hand, the 
Church of the Jews should give us, in its integrity, 
that Word which records its revolts, which predicts its 
ruin, which describes Jesus Christ ; and, on the other, 
that the Christian Churches (the most powerful of 
which, and the Roman sect in particular, interdicted 
the people from reading the sacred books, and substi- 
tuted in so many ways the traditions of the middle ages 
for the Word of God) should nevertheless transmit to 
us, in all their purity, those Scriptures, which condemn 
all their traditions, their images, their dead languages, 
their absolutions, their celibacy ; which say, that Rome 
would be the seat of a terrible apostasy, where " the 
Man of Sin would be seen sitting as God in the temple 
of God, waging war on the saints, forbidding to marry, 
and to use meats which God had created;" which say 
of images, "Thou shalt not bow down to them" — of 
unknown tongues, *' Thou shalt not use them" — of the 
cup, " Drink ye all of it" — of the Virgin, " Woman, 
what have I to do with thee?" — and of marriage, "It 
is honourable in all." 

Now, although all the libraries in which ancient 
copies of the sacred books may be found, have been 
called upon to give their testimony; although the eluci- 
dations given by the fathers of all ages have been studied ; 
although the Arabic, Syriac, Latin, Armenian, and 
Ethiopian versions have been collated ; although all 
the maniiscrij)ts of all countries and ages, from the 
third to the sixteenth century, have been collected and 
examined a thousand times over, by countless critics, 
who have eagerly sought out some new text, as the re- 
compense and the glory of their wearisome w;Kchings ; 
although learned men, not content with the libraries of 
the West, have visited tliose of Russia, aiid carried 
their researches into the monasteries of Mont Athos, 
Turkish Asia, and Egypt, there to look for new instru- 
ments of the sacred ti'Xt ; — " Nothing has been disco- 
vered," says a learned persou, already quoted, "not 



•both in the new and old testaments. 171 

even a^ingle reading, that could throw doubt on any 
one of the passages before considered as certain. All 
the variantes, almost without exception, leave untouched 
the essential ideas of each phrase, and bear only on 
points of secondary importance ;" such as the insertion 
or the omission of an article or a conjunction, the posi- 
tion of an adjective before or after its substantive, the 
greater or less exactness of a grammatical construc- 
tion. 

And would we be less rigorous in our demands with 
respect to the Old Testament? — the famous Indian 
manuscript, recently deposited in the Cambridge li- 
brary, will furnish an example. 

It is thirty- three years since the pious and learned 
Claudius Buchanan, while visiting, in the Indian penin- 
sula, the black Jews of Malabar (who are supposed to be 
the remains of the first. dispersion under Nebuchadnez- 
zar), saw in their possession an immense roll, com- 
posed of thirty-seven skins, tinged with red, forty- eight 
feet long, twenty- two inches wide, and which, in its 
originally entire state, must have had ninety English 
feet of development. The Holy Scriptures had been 
traced on it by different hands. There remained one 
hundred and seventeen columns of beautiful writing ; 
and there was wanting only Leviticus and part of 
Deuteronomy. Buchanan succeeded in having this 
ancient and precious monument, which served for the 
worship of the synagogue, committed to his care, and 
he afterwards deposited it in the Cambridge lib- 
rary. 

The impossibility of supposing that this roll had been 
taken from a copy brought by European Jews, was 
perceived from certain evident marks. Now, ]Mr Yeates 
lately submitted it to the most attentive examination ; 
and took the trouble to collate it, word by word, letter 
by letter, with our Hebrew edition of Van der Hooght. 
He has published the results of his researches. And 
what have they been ? Why, this : that there do not 
exist, between the text of India and that of the "West, 



172 CAREFUL COPYING OF THE MASSORETHES.# 

above forty small differences, not one of which is of 
sufficient importance to lead to even a slight change in 
the meaning and interpretation of our ancient text ; and 
that these are but the additions or retrenchments of an 
•^ or a % — letters the presence or absence of which, in 
Hebrew, cannot alter the import of the word/ 

We know the peculiar character, among tlie Jews, of 
those Massorethes, or doctors of tradition, whose whole 
profession consisted in transcribing the Scriptures, — we 
know to what a pitch these learned men carried respect 
for the letter ; and when we read the rules that regu- 
lated their labours, we can comprehend what use the 
providence of the Lord, who had "committed his ora- 
cles to the Jewish people," knew to make of their 
reverential respect, their strictness, and even their super- 
stition. In each of the books they counted the number 
of verses, of words, of letters : they could have told 
you, for example, that the letter k appears forty- two 
thoiisand three hundred and seventy-seven times in the 
Bible, the letter a thirty- eight thousand two hundred 
and eigiiteen times, and so on : they would have scru- 
pled at changing the position of a single letter evidently 
displaced ; they would only have called your attention 
to it on the margin, and would have supposed some 
mystery involved in it ; they would have told you the 
middle letter in the Pentateuch, and that which is in 
the middle of each of the particular books of which it 
is composed : they never would permit themsc^lves to 
retouch their manuscript ; and if any mistake had 
escaped from them, they would have rejected the pa- 
pyrus or the parchment which it had spoilt, and would 
have begun anew ; for they were equally interdicted 
from ever correcting any of their blunders, and from 
preserving for their sacred volume a parchment or 
skin that had suffered any erasure. 

This intervention of God's providence in the preser- 

> See Christian Observer, vol. xii. p. 170. Examen d'un exem- 
plaire Indian du Pentateuque, p. 8. Home's Introduction and Ap- 
pendix, p. 95, edition 1818. 



GODS PROVIDENTIAL CARE OF THE 0. T. TEXT. 173 

yation of the Old Testament becomes still more striking 
in our eyes, if we compare the astonishing integrity of 
the original Hebrew (at the close of so many centuries) 
with the rapid and profound alteration which the Greek 
version of the Septuagint had undergone in the days of 
Jesus Christ (after the lapse of only two hundred years). 
Notwithstanding that that book had acquired throughout 
the whole East, after the almost universal propagation 
of the Greek language, a semicanonical authority, first 
among the Jews and then among the Christians ; not- 
withstanding its being afterwards the only text to which 
the fathers of the East and of the AY est (with the ex- 
ception of Origen and of Jerome) had recourse for what 
they knew of the Old Testament, the only one that was 
commented on by the Chrysostoms and the Theodorets 
— the only one whence such men as Athanasius, Basil, 
and Gregory of Nazianzus drew their arguments ; 
notwithstanding that the Western no more than the 
Eastern world had any better source of illumination, 
during so many ages, than that borrowed light (seeing 
that the ancient Italian Vulgate, which was in universal 
use, had been translated from the Greek of the Septua- 
gint, and not from the Hebrew of the original) ; yet 
hear what the learned tell us of the alteration of that 
important monument — of the additions, changes, and 
interpolations to which it had been subjected, first 
through the doings of the ancient Jews before the days 
of Jesus Christ, after that by the unbelieving Jews, 
and later still through the heedlessness of Christian 
copyists: "The evil was such {inirum in modum)" 
says Dr Lee, " that in certain books the ancient version 
could hardly be recognised ; and when Origen, in 
the year 231, had devoted twenty-eight years of his 
noble life in searching for different manuscripts of it, 
with the view of doing for that text (in his Tetrnpla 
and his Hexapla) what modern critics have done for 
that of the Old and New Testaments, not only could he 
not find any copy that was correct, but he further made 
matters worse. Through the unskilfulness of the copy- 



174 god's providential care of the n. t. text. 

ists (who neglected the transcriptions of his ohelisks, 
asterisks, and other marks), the greater number of his 
marginal corrections found their way into the text ; so 
that new errors having spread there, one could no 
longer, in the time of Jerome, distinguish between his 
annotations and the primitive text."^ We repeat, these 
facts, placed in contrast with the astonishing preserva- 
tion of the Hebrew text (older than that of tlie LXX. 
by more -than twelve hundred years), proclaim loudly 
enough how necessary it was that the mighty hand of 
God should intervene in the destinies of the sacred 
book. 

So much for the Old Testament. But let it not be 
thought that the Providence that watched over that 
sacred book, and which committed it to the Jews 
(Rom. iii. 1, 2), has done less for the protection of the 
oracles of the New Testament, committed by it to the 
new people of God. It has not left to the latter 
less cogent motives to gratitude and feelings of se- 
curity. 

Here we would appeal, by way of testimony, to the 
late experience of the authors of a version of the New 
Testament which has just been published in Switzer- 
land, and in the long labours of which we ourselves 
had a part. A single trait may enable all classes of 
readers to understand how very insignificant are the 
different readings presented by the manuscripts. The 
translators to whom we refer followed, without the 
smallest deviation, what is called the received edition, 
that is to say, the Greek text of Elzevir, 1()24, so long 
adopted by all our Churches; but as, in conformity 
with the original plan of the work they had under- 
taken, they liad first of all to introduce into their 
original text the various readings that have been most 
approved by the criticism of the last century, they very 
often found themselves embarrassed, from perceiving 
the impossibility of expressing, even in the most literal 

1 Proleg. in Bibl. Polyglott. Bagsteriana (iv. sect. 2.) 



ILLUSTRATION FROM MARTIN AND OSTERWALD. 175 

French, the new shade of meaning introduced hy that 
correction into their Greek. The French language, in 
the most scrupulous version, has not flexibility enough 
to enable it to assume these differences of manner, so 
as to put them in proper relief; just as the casts taken 
from the face of a king reproduce in brass his noble 
features, yet without being capable of marking every 
vein and wrinkle. 

We desire, however, to give such of our readers as 
are strangers to sacred criticism, two or three other 
and still more intelligible means of estimating that 
providence which has for thirty centuries watched over 
our sacred texts. 

The first is as follows : We would bid them com- 
pare the two Protestant translations by Osterwald and 
Martin. There are few modem versions that come so 
close to each other. The old version of the Geneva 
pastors having been taken as the basis of both — both 
having been \ATitten at nearly the same time and in the 
same spirit — they differ so little, especially in the New 
Testament, that our Bible societies distribute them in- 
diff'erently, and that one finds it hard to say which of 
the two ought to be preferred. Nevertheless, if you 
take the trouble to note their diff'erences, taking all 
things into account, as has been done on comparing our 
four hundred manuscripts of the New Testament, the 
one with the other, we affirm beforehand (and rather 
think that in this we under-state the truth), that these 
two French texts are three times, and in many chapters 
ten times, wider from each other than the Greek text 
of our printed editions is, we will not say only from 
the least esteemed of the Greek manuscripts of our 
libraries, but from all their manuscripts put to- 
gether. Hence we will venture to say, that were some 
able and ill meaning person (such as we may suppose 
the wretched Voltaire or the too celebrated Anthony 
Collins to have been in the last century) to study to 
select at will, out of all the manuscripts of the East 
and the West, when placed before him, the worst read- 
17 



176 ILLUSTRATION FROM GRIESBACn's CORRECTIONS. 

ings and the variations most remote from our received 
text, with the perfidious intention of composing at 
pleasure the most faulty text — such a man, we say (even 
were he to adopt such various readings as should have 
in their favour no more than one sole manuscript out 
of the four or five hundred of our libraries), could not, 
in spite of all his mischievous inclination, produce a 
Testament, as the result of his labours, that would be 
less close to that of our Churches than Martin is to 
Osterwald. Further, you might send it abroad instead 
of the true text, with as little inconvenience as you 
would find in giving French Protestants Martin rather 
than Osterwald, or Osterwald rather than Martin ; and 
with far less scruple than you would feel in circulating 
De Sacy's version among the followers of the Church 
of Rome. 

No doubt these last books are only translations, 
whereas all the Greek manuscripts profess to be original 
texts ; and it must be admitted that, in this respect, 
our comparison is very imperfect : but it is not less 
fitted to re-assure the friends of the Word of God, by- 
enabling them to understand the extreme insignificance 
of the various readings. 

Meanwhile, what follows is something more direct 
and more precise. 

In order to give all our readers some measure at once 
of the number and of the harmlessness of the read- 
ings that have been collected together in the manuscripts 
of our libraries, we proceed to present two specimens of 
these. It will consist, first, of a schedule containing 
the first eight verses of the Epistle to the Romans, with 
all the VARIOUS READINGS relating to these in all 
THE manuscripts of the East and of the West. This 
will be followed by a schedule of the whole epistle, 
with ALL THE corrections that the celebrated Gries- 
bach, the oracle of modern criticism, thought he ought 
to introduce into it. 

We have taken these passages at random, and de- 
clare that we have not been led to make choice of them 



MARTIN AND OSTERWALD COMPARED. 177 

in preference to others, by any reason bearing upon our 
argument. 

We feel gratified at placing these short documents 
before the eyes of persons who are not called by their 
position to follow out, of themselves, the investigations 
of sacred criticism, and whose minds, nevertheless, may 
have been somewhat discomposed by the language, 
at once mysterious and imposing, which the rationalists 
of the last century have so often employed on the sub- 
ject. To hear them speak, would you not have said 
that modem science was about to give us a new Bible, 
to bring down Jesus Christ from the throne of God, to 
restore to man, when calumniated by our theology, all 
his titles to innocence, and to set to rights all the dogmas 
of our old orthodoxy ? 

As a first term of comparison, our columns will pre- 
sent first of all, in the eight first verses of the Epistle to 
the Romans, the differences betwixt the one text of 
Martin (1707) and the one text of Osterwald, (Bag- 
ster's edition), while the following columns, instead of 
comparing any one sole manuscript with any other sole 
manuscript whatsoever, will present the differences be- 
tv^-een our received text and all the manuscripts that 
one has been able to collect down to Griesbach. That 
learned and indefatigable person, for the Epistle to the 
Romans, scrutinized first of all seven manuscripts writ- 
ten WITH UNCIAL letters (or Greek capitals), and it is 
thought, from thirteen to fourteen centuries old, (the 
Alexandrine^ in the British Museum ; that of the Vati- 
can^ and that of Cardinal Passionei at Rome ; that of 
Ephrem at Paris ; that of St Germain, that of Dresden, 
and that of Cardinal Coislin) ; and after that,- a hun- 
dred and ten manuscripts in small letters^ and thirty 
others, brought for the most part from Mount Athos, 
and consulted by the learned Matthei, who travelled long 
for that purpose in Russia and the East. 

For the four Gospels, the same Griesbach had op- 
portunities of consulting as many as three hundred and 
thirty-five manuscripts. 



178 



MARTIN AND OSTERWALD COMPARED. 



VARIOUS READINGS. 
FIRST TABLE. 



OSTERWALD'S TeXT. 

Ver. 2. qu'il. 

promis auparavant. 
... 3. de la race. 
... 4. et qui selon TEsprit . . . 
a ete. 
a et6 declarfe. 
avec puissance, 
par sa resurrection. 
I'Esprit de saintet^. 
S avoir. 

J. C. notre Seigneur. 
... 5. afin d'amener tous les 
Gentils a Tobeissance 
de la foi. 
... 6. du nombre desquela 
vous etes aussi, vous. 
qui avez ete appeles. 
... 7. appeles et saints. 
la grace et la paix 
vous soient donnees 
de la part de Dieu notre 

pere 
et de 

notre Seigneur J. C. 
... 8. Avant toutes choses. 
au sujet de vous tous. 
est celebre. 



Martin's Text (1707.) 

lequel. 

auparavant promis. 

de la semence. 

et qui a ete selon, .... 

TEsprit. 
a ete pleinement declar6. 
en puissance, 
par la resurrection. 
I'Esprit de sanctification. 
c'est a dire, 
notre Seigneur J. C. 
afin qu'il y ait obeissancede 

foi parmi tous lea Gentils. 

entre lesquels 
aussi vous etes, voua 
qui etes appeles. 
appeles d etre sjiinta. 
grace vous soit et paix 
vous soient donnees 
de par Dieu notre pere 

et de par 

le Seigneur J. C. 

Premierement. 

touchant vous tous. 

est renommee. 



These differences between the t^vo French texts are 
sufficiently insignificant ; and were one to tell us that, 
in all these verses, one or other of the two is inspired of 
God, oMr faith would receive great aid from this. Now 
it will be seen that the various readings of the Greek 
manuscripts are still more insignificant. 

Let us now examine, on the same verses, the table 
containing the received text, compared with all the dif- 
ferent readings that could be presented by the hundred 
and fifty Greek manuscripts collected and consulted for 
the Epistle to the Romans. 



ELZEVIR COMPARED WITH VARIOUS READINGS. 179 



Here we shall not point out either the differences 
presented by the ancient translations, or those that be- 
long only to the punctuation (that element being almost 
null in the most ancient manuscripts). 

We shall translate the first column (that of the re- 
ceived text) according to the old version, which is more 
literal than Osterwald's ; and ^\e shall also endeavour to 
render the Greek readings of the second column as ex- 
actly as possible. 

SECOND TABLE. 



The received Text— (that of 
Elzevir, 1624.) 

Ver. 1. No difference. 
... 2. by hia prophets. 



... 3. who was made. 



4. and declared. 



5. No difFerence. 

6. No difference. 

7. that be in Rome, beloved 

of God, called. 



from God our Father. 
First 



for you all. 



Various Readings, collected 
FROM among all the Greek 
Manuscripts united. 

by the prophets. 

(In a single Parisian manvr 

sa-ipt.) 
who was begotten. 
{In a single Upsala manuscript^ 

and by the inere change of two 

letters.) 
and predeclared. 
(In only one of the twenty-two^ 

manuscripts of the Barberini 

Library.) 

who are in the love of God, called. 

(A single mamtscrivt—that of 
Dresden, in uncial letters.) 

that be in Rome, called. 

(Only two manuscripts — that of 
St Germain, in uncial letters^ 
and a Roman one, in small let- 
ters.) 

from God the Father. 

(A single Upsala manuscript.) 

First. 

( The difference untranslatable. It 
is to be found in only one mOf 
nuscript.) 

with respect to you all. 

(Two manuscripts.) 



Here we have nine or ten different readings, of no 
importance in themselves; and, moreover, they have in 



180 GRIESBACH FAVOURED NEW READINGS. 

their favour only one or two manuscripts of the hundred 
and fifty open to consultation on those eight verses, 
with the exception of the last (" for you all," instead of 
" with respect to you all"), which reckons in its favour 
twelve manuscripts, four of which are in uncial letters. 

The differences between Osterwald's and Martin's 
translations are three times as numerous ; and, gene- 
rally speaking, these differences are far more important 
in point of meaning. This comparison, were we to 
continue it through the whole New Testament, would 
bear the same character, and become even still more 
insignificant. 

Nevertheless, those of our readers who have hitherto 
been strangers to such researches will not be displeased, 
we believe, at our offering, in a third table, a fresh 
method of estimating the harmlessness of the variations, 
and the nullity of the objection that has been drawn 
from them. 

This last table will present the totality of the correc- 
tions which, according to the learned Griesbach, the 
father of sacred criticism, ought to be introduced into 
the text of the Epistle to the Romans, after the pro- 
longed study of the extant manuscripts to which he had 
devoted himself, and after all that had been done by 
his predecessors in the same field of research. 

No one who has not entered on these researches, can 
form a just idea of the immensity of those laboui-s. 

Before perusing this third table, however, we would 
have the reader to know — 

Firsts That Griesbach is, in general, charged by the 
learned (such as Matthaei, Nolan, Lawrence, Scholz, 
and others) with an excessive eagerness for the admis- 
sion of new readings into the ancient text. This ten- 
dency is explained by the habits of the human heart. 
The learned Whitby had, before that, charged Dr Mill, 
not without some foundation, with the same fault, 
although he had never ventui'ed on so many corrections 
as Griesbach. 

Secondly^ Observe, further, that in this table we give 



RECEIVED TEXT AND GRIESBACH COMPARED. 181 

not only those corrections Avhich the learned critic was 
fully persuaded people ought to adopts but those also 
which he has said were as yet only doubtful in his eyes, 
and not to be confidently preferred to the generally 
received text. 

THIRD TABLE. 



GRIESBACH S CORRECTIONS, EXTENDING TO THE WHOLE OP 
THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 



Received Text. — Substan- 
tially OUR English Vebsion. 



New Text. — Corrected by 
Griesbach. 



CHAPTER I. 



Ver. 13. that I might have some 
fruit. 



... 16. I am not ashamed. 

... — the gospel of Christ. 
... 19. for God. 

... 21. glorified him not. 

... 24. Wherefore God also. 
... 27. And likewise. 

... 29. with all unrighteous- 
ness, fornication,wifik- 
edness. 

... 81. without, natural affec- 
tion, implacable, un- 
merciful. 



that I might have some fruit. 

{There is here a mere inversion qf 
the words.) 

I am not ashamed. 

{Difference cannot be explained 
hy translation.) 

the gospel. 

for God. 

{Difference cannot he explained.) 

glorified him not. 

{Difference one of orthography.) 

Wherefore God. 

And likewise. 

{Difference not translatable.) 

with all unrighteousness, wicked- 
ness. 

without natural affection, unmer- 
ciful. 



CHAPTER II. 

Ver. 8, indignation and wrath. | wrath and indignation. 



13. the hearers of the law. 



the hearers of t/ie law. 

{The mere absence of the article.) 



CHAPTER III. 



Ver. 22. unto all and upon all 
them that believe. 

... 25. through the faith. 

... 28. Therefore we conclude, 
that a man is justified 
by the faith. 

... 29. is he not. 



xmto all them who believe. 

through faith. 

In fact we conclude, that a man 
is justified by faith. 

is he not. 

{Difference not translatable,^ 



182 RECEIVED TEXT AND GRIESBACH COMPARED, 



CHAPTER IV. 



Ver. 1. What ehall we then say, 
that Abraham hath 
found. 
Abraham our father. 
4. as a debt. 
... 12. in the circumcision. 
... 13. heir of the world. 



19. And being not weak in 
faith, he considered 
not. 



What shall we then say, that hath 
found Abraham. 

Abraham our ancestor. 

as debt. 

in circumcision. 

heir of the world. 

(A difference that cannot he ren- 
dered.) 

and did not, weak in the faith, 
consider. 



CHAPTER V. 



Ver. 14. to Moses. 



to Moses. 

{Difference in spelling.) 



CHAPTER VI. 



Ver. 1. Shall we continue. 



11. yourselves to be dead, 
through Jesus Christ, 

our Lord. 

12. that ye should obey it 

in the lusts thereof. 
16. whether of sin unto 
death, or of obedience 
unto righteousness. 



Shall we continue. 
{Pronoun understood — not ex- 
pressed.) 
yourselves dead, 
through Jesus Christ. 

that ye should obey it. 

whether of sin, or of obedience 
unto righteousness. 



Ver. 6. the law by which . , 
being dead. 
... 10. the commandment 
whicli. 

... 14. carnal. 

... 18. I find not. 



CHAPTER VII. 

being dead to the law by which. 
the commandment which. 



(Difference of a simple aeeetU.) 

cnrnnl. 

( Difftrence of a letter.) 

I tiihl not. 

{Diffa-ence of orthography.) 



IN THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 



1183 



CHAPTEE VIII. 



Ver. 1. to them which are in 
Jesus Christ, who walk 
not after the flesh but 
after the Spirit. 



11. by his Spirit that dwel- 

Jeth in you. 
26. our infirmities. 

what we should pray for. 

maketh intercession for 
us with groanings. 
36. For thy sake. 

38. nor angels, nor princi- 
palities, nor powers, 
nor things present, nor 
things to come. 



To them which are in Christ 
Jesus. 



{The words left out here re-occur 
at verse 4.) 

on account of his Spirit that 
dwelleth in you. 

our infirmity. 

what we should pray for. 

{Difference cannot he rendered.) 

maketh intercession with groan- 
ings. 

for thy sake. 

{Difference untranslatable.) 

nor angels, nor principalities, nor 
things present, nor things to 
come, nor powers. 



CHAPTER IX. 



Ver. 11. neither good nor evil 
that the purpose, ac- 
cording to the election 
of God. 

... 15. He saith to Moses. 

... 32. as it were by the works 
of the law. 
for fhey stumbled. 

... 33. whosoever believeth on 
him. 



neither good nor evil that the 
purpose of God according to 
the election. 

(Different not easily rendered.) 
he saith to Moses. 
{Difference in spelling.) 
as it were by works. 

they stumbled. 

he that believeth on him. 



CHAPTER X. 



Ver. 1. prayer to God for Israel, 
that they might be 
saved. 

5. Moses. 

... IS. bring glad tidings. 

... 19. Did not Israel know ? 
Moses. 



prayer to God for them, 
that they might be saved. 

{Difference cannot he expressed.) 

Moses. 

{Different spelling.) 

bring glad tidings. 

{Difference cannot he translated.) 

Did it not know, Israel ? 

Moses. 

{Difference in spelling.) 



184 RECEIVED TEXT AND GRTESBACH COMPARED, 



CHAPTER XI. 



Ver. 2. against Israel, saying : 
Lord. . . . 
3. and they have digged 
down the altars. 

6. And if by grace, then it 

is no more of works; 
otherwise grace is no 
more grace. But if 
it be of works, then it 
is no more grace ; 
otherwise work is no 
more work. 

7. he hath not obtained. 



19. The branches were bro- 
ken off. 
21. spare not thee. 

23. And they also. 

30. and as ye have been 
yourselves in times 
past. 



against Israel : Lord. . . . 

they have digged down the altars. 

And if by grace, then it is no 
more of works; otherwise grace 
is no more grace. 



he hath not obtained. 
{Difference not translatable.) 
branches were broken oflF. 

spare not thee. 

{Difference cannot he rendered.) 
and they also. 
{Difference in spelling.) 
ana as ye have been in times 
past. 



CHAPTER XII. 



Ver. 2. And be not conformed, 
. . . but be ye trans- 
formed, 
by the renewing of your 
mind. 
... 11. serving the Lord. 



... 20. Therefore if thine enemy 
hunger. 



And that ye be not conformed, . 
. . but that ye be transformed. 

by the renewing of the mind. 

serving the occasion. 

{The difference lies hut in two 

letters, the one changed, the other 

transposed.) 
if thine enemy hunger. 



CHAPTER XIII. 



Ver. 1. 



but of God; and 
powers that be. 
are ordained of God, 



the 



but that ye love one 

another, 
thou shalt not steal, 

thou ehalt not bear 

false witness, thou 

Shalt not covet. 



but from God, and those that be. 

are ordained of God. 
{Dfference not translcUahle.) 
but that ye one another love. 

Thou ehalt not steal, thou shalt 
not covet. 



IN THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 



185 



CHAPTER XIV. 



Ver. 9. Christ both died, and 
rose, and revived that. 

... 14. Nothing is unclean of 

itself. 



Christ both died and lived that. 
( The difference lies only in adding 

two letters.). 
Nothing is unclean of itself. 
{^Difference untranslatable.) 



CHAPTER XV. 



Ver. 1. "We then that are strong 
ought to. 



2. Let every one of us 

please. 
4. For whatsoever things 
were written afore- 
time . . . were writ- 
ten. 
8. Now I say. 

... 19. by the power of the Spi- 
rit of God. 

... 24. I will come to you when- 
soever I take my jour- 
ney into Spain, and I 
hope that I shall see 
you. 

... 29. in the fulness of the 
blessing of the gospel 
of Christ. 



(Onesiach thinks that protally 
here ought to be placed the three 
verses at the end of the Epis- 
tle :) Now, to him . . . We 
then that are strong ought to. 

{The question is merely about a 
transposition ; and one which 
Scholz has not adopted.) 

{A difference that cannot be ren- 
dered.) 

{A difference that cannot he ren- 
dered.) 



for I say. 

by the power of the Spirit. 

whensoever I take my journey 
into Spain, I hope that I shall 
see you. 



in the fulness of the blessing of 

Christ. 



CHAPTER XVI. 



Ver. 2. for she hath been a 
succourer. 
.. 3. Priscilia. 

5. Who is the first fruits 

of Achaia. 

6. Who bestowed much 

labour on us. 
... 18. serve not our Lord Jesus 

Christ. 
^. 20. The grace of our Lord 

Jesus Christ be with 

you ! Amen. 
... 25. Now to him that is of 

power. . . . 



{The difference cannot he reru 

dered.) 
Prisca. 
Who is the first fruits of Asia. 

Who bestowed much labour on 

you. 
Serve not our Lord Christ. 

the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ 
be with you. 

{These words according to Ories- 
bach, ought rather to be placed 
at the beginning of chapter xv.) 



186 INSIGNIFICANCE OF THE TARIOUS READINGS. 

Here, then, the thing is evident : such is the real 
insignificance of the various readings about which so 
much noise was made at first. Such has been the asto- 
nishing preservation of the Greek manuscripts of the 
New Testament that have been transmitted to us. 

After the copying and recopying of the sacred text, 
whether in Europe, in Asia, or in Africa, whether in 
monasteries, or in colleges, or in palaces, or in the 
houses of the clergy (and this, too, almost without in- 
terruption, during the long course of fifteen hundred 
years); — after that during the three last centuries, and, 
above all, in the hundred and thirty years that have 
just elapsed, so many noble characters, so many inge- 
nious minds, so many learned lives have been consumed 
in labours hitherto unheard of for their extent, admir- 
able for their sagacity, and scrupulous as those of the 
Massorethes ; — after having scrutinized all the Greek 
manuscripts of the New Testament that are buried in 
the private, or monastic, or national libraries, of the 
East and of the West ; — after these have been compared, 
not only with all the old translations, Latin, Armenian, 
Sahidic, Ethiopic, Arabic, Sclavonian, Persian, Coptic, 
Syrian, and Gothic, of the Scriptures, but further, with 
all the ancient fathers of the Church, who have quoted 
them in their innumerable writings, in Greek and in 
Latin ; — alter so many researches, take this single exam- 
ple, as a specimen of what people have been able to find ! 

Judge of the matter by this one epistle which you 
have before you. It is the longest and most important 
of the epistles of the New Testament, " the golden key 
of the Scriptures " (as it has been called), " the ocean of 
Christian doctrine." It contains four hundred and 
thirty three verses, and in these four hundred and thirty- 
three verses, ninety-six Greek words that are met 
with nowhere else in the New Testament. And how 
many (admitting even all the corrections that have been 
adopted, or only preferred by Griesbach), how many 
have you found, in these, of readings that go to change, 
even sliglitly, the meaning of some phrase ? You have 



QRTESBACH S ALTERATIONS EXAMINED. 18? 

seen five such ! And, further, what are these ? We 
shall repeat them ; thej are as follows : — 

The first (chap. vii. 6) instead of" That in which,., 
being dead" Grieshach reads, " Beiiig dead to that in 
which!' And note well that here in the Greek, the dif- 
ference depends only on the change of a single letter 
(an instead of an e) ; and besides that, the greater 
number of manuscripts were so much in favour of the 
old text that, since Griesbach's time, Mr Tittman, in 
his edition of 1824, has rejected this correction, and Mr 
Lachman has done so also, in his edition of 1831 (Scholz, 
however, has retained it). 

The second is as follows, chapter xi. 6 : — 
Instead of, " And ifhy grace^ then is it no more of 
icorks ; otherwise grace is no more grace ; but if it be 
ofworks^ then is it no more grace: otherwise work is no 
more work" Grieshach takes away the latter half of 
this phrase. 

The third is as follows, chapter xii. 11 : — 
Instead of, " Serving the Lord" Grieshach reads, 
" Serving the occasion." Note that the correction de- 
pends only on the change of two letters in one of the 
Greek words, and that, moreover, it does not appear to 
be justified by the number of the manuscripts. Further 
here, Whitby told Mill that more than thirty manu- 
scripts, that all the ancient translations, that Clement 
of Alexandria, St Basil, St Jerome, all the scholiasts of 
the Greeks, and all those of the Latins with the excep- 
tion of Ambrose, followed the old text ; and the two 
learned men whom we have just named (Lachman and 
Tittman), the one labouring at Berlin, the other a pro- 
fessor at Leipsic, have restored the old text, in their 
respective editions of the New Testament. This has 
been done also by Scholz, in his edition of 1836, which 
the learned world seems to prefer to all that have pre- 
ceded it. 

The fourth is as follows, chapter vi. 1 6 : — 
Instead of, " Whether of sin unto death or of right- 
eousness^" Grieshach reads, " Whether of sin or of 
18 



188 THE EPISTLE TO THE GALATIAN8. 

righteousness/' but he himself puts at the place the 
simple sign of a feeble probability; and Tittman and 
Lachman, in their respective editions, have further 
rejected this correction. Scholz, following their example, 
has equally rejected it. 

The fifth is as follows, chapter xvi. 5 : — 

Instead of, " The first fruits of Achaia," Griesbach 
reads, " The first fruits of Asia J' 

Here we have taken no notice of the words that are 
taken away from the first paragraph of chapter viii., be- 
cause we find them again at the 4th verse. 

We see, then, the amount of the whole : such is the 
admirable integrity of the Epistle to the Romans. Ac- 
cording to Griesbach^z;^ insignificant corrections^ in the 
whole epistle — according to more modern critics only 
TWO, and these the most insignificant of the five ; — and 
according to Scholz three ! 

We repeat, that we have chosen the Epistle to the 
Romans, as a specimen, only because of its length and 
its importance. We have not given ourselves the time- 
to examine whether it presents more or fewer various 
readings than any other part of the New Testament. 
We have run over, for example, in Griesbach, while 
reviewing these last pages, the Epistle to the Gala- 
TTANS, written at the same time and on the same sub- 
ject with the Epistle to the Romans ; and there we 
have been unable to find more than the three following 
corrections that can affect the sense, or, to speak more 
correctly, the form of the sense : — 

Chap. iv. 17. " They would exclude us" — say^ " They 
would exclude you." 

Chap. iv. 26. " She is the mother of us all" — say, 
" She is the mother of us." 

Chap. V. 19. " Adultery, fornication, uncleanness" — 
«ay, " Fornication, uncleanness." 

These simple schedules, in our opinion, will speak 
more loudly to our readers than all our general asser- 
tions could do. Of this we ourselves have felt the 
happy experience. We had read, no doubt, what others 



PRECISE LIMITS OF OUR UNCERTAINTY. 189 

before us have been able to say on the insignificance of 
the different readings presented by the manuscripts ; and 
we had often studied the various readings of Mill and 
the severe reproaches of his adversary Whitby ; ^ we 
had examined the writings of Wetstein, of Griesbach, 
of Lachman, and of Tittman ; but when, on two occa- 
sions, while taking part in the work of a new translation 
of the New Testament, we have been called upon to 
correct the French text according to the most esteemed 
various readings, first to introduce these into it, and 
afterwards to remove them out of it again, and to re- 
place there in French the sense conveyed by the old 
reading ; then Ave have had on two occasions, as it were, 
an intuition of that astonishing preservation of the 
Scriptures, and we have felt ourselves penetrated with 
gratitude towards that wonderful providence which has 
not ceased to watch over the oracles of God, in order to 
preserve their integrity to this point. 

Let its true value be then assigned to the objection 
that has been made to us. 

Let it be shown us, for example, how three or four 
various readings that we have passed under review in 
the Epistle to the Romans, and which, in the opinion 
of the most modem critics, are reduced to two or to 
three, could render the fact of its original inspiration 
illusory for us. 

No doubt, in these three or four passages, as well as 
in those of the other sacred books where the true word 
of the text might be contested, no doubt there, and 
there alone, of the two different readings of the manu- 
scripts, one is the inspired word, and not the other ; 
no doubt people must in this small number of cases 
divide or suspend their confidence between two expres- 
sions ; but such is the extent that uncertainty reaches ; 
5uch the point beyond which it must not go. 

It is reckoned, that of the seven thousand nine hun- 
dred and fifty-nine verses of the 2> ew Testament, there 

1 Ezamen variantium lectionuna. J. Millii. Lond, 1710. 



190 griesbach's new readings. 

hardly exist ten or twelve in which the corrections that 
have been introduced by the new readings of Griesbach 
and Scholz, as the result of their immense researches, 
have any weight at all. Further, in most instances 
they consist but in the difference of a single word, "^nd 
sometimes even of a single letter. 

"We should be doing well, perhaps, to point these 
out here also, as an addition to those to which we have 
directed the reader's attention in the Epistle to the 
Romans. 

The twelve or thirteen following have usually been 
regarded as the most important among the various read- 
ings collected by Griesbach, and more recently by Scholz. 
The four first even have appeared the most serious, only 
because they strike at the divinity of Jesus Christ. 

l5<, (Acts XX. 28.) — Instead of— ^^ Feed the Church 
of God, which he hath bought with his own blood," 

The text of Griesbach bears — " Feed the Church of 
the Lord, which he hath bought with his own blood." 

Here the difference of the reading preferred by Gries- 
bach consists in a single letter (kt, instead of ex). 
Scholz even preserves the old text. 

2d^ (1 Tim. iii. 16.) — Instead of — " And without con- 
troversy great is the mystery of godliness, God was 
manifested in the flesh, justified in the Spirit," .... 

Some manuscripts bear — " Without controversy, great 
is the mystery of godliness, which was manifest in the 
flesh, justified in the Spirit." 

But some other manuscripts adopted bi/ Griesbach 
bear — " Great is the mystery of godliness, he who was 
manifest in the flesh was justified in the Spirit." .... 

Here the difference is still no more than that of a 
single letter, or even only that of two strokes of a 
letter (some manuscripts instead of es, having 02, and 
others O). 

Scholz has not admitted Griesbach's correction. Al- 
most all the Greek manuscripts, says he, bear Qihg 
(God). He assures us he has found it in eighty-six 
manuscripts, examined by himself. 



GRIESBACH AND SCHOLZ. 191 

Sd, (Jude 4.) — Instead of — " AVho deny our only 
ruler, God and Saviour, Jesus Christ," 

The text of Griesbach and that of Scholz bears — 
" Who deny our only master and Lord Jesus Christ." 

Here the ditierence is only in these two letters (eN, 
God), omitted in the manuscripts which Griesbach has 
preferred. 

We approve of tlie adversaries of the divinity of Jesus 
Christ attaching importance to these three first correc- 
tions, in respect of criticism (for every thing is of im- 
portance in the Scripture), but in respect of doctrine, 
we cannot comprehend how they should do so; inas- 
much as, by their own admission, there are many other 
passages without various readings, in which our Lord 
is called by the name of God, of true God, of the great 
God. No manuscript, for example, presents varia- 
tions on the first verse of the Gospel of St John : " In 
the heginning was the Word, and the Wo7^d was loith 
God, and the Word was God"^ So, too, no Greek 
manuscript whatsoever presents a variation in the read- 
ing of that verse of the Epistle to Titus (ii. 13) — 
" Looking for the glorious appearance of our great God 
and Saviour Jesus Christ." ^ 

4tth, (1 John V. 7, 8.) — Instead of—'''- There are three 
that bear witness [in heaven : the Father, the Word, 
and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one ('EN); 
and there are three that bear witness] in the earth, 

1 One sole manuscript, among three hundred and fifty, that of 
Stephanas, of the 8th or 9th century, puts an article before the name 
of God, Avhich would not even change the meaning here, 

2 We know that Mr Wordsworth, to ascertain the meaning that 
was given to that passage and tl\e following (Eph. v. 5; 2Thes. i. 12; 
2 Tim. iv. i; Jude 4; 2 Pet. i. 1; James i. 1 ; 1 Tim. i, 1), at the 
time when the Greek was a living tongue, was not afraid to consult 
the voluminous writings of seventy Greek and sixty Latin contempo- 
rary fathers, and that he saw that they invariably put the same 
Bense on these constructions, as designating one and the same per- 
son. In the space of a thousand years (from the 2d to tlie r2th 
century) he found fifty- four authorities of Greek fathers and sixty 
of Latin fathers, unanimously giving the same meaning to those 
words of Paul (Titus ii. 13): Our great God and Sapiour. The 
heretica themselves, says he, during the long triumph of Arianism, 



192 BISHOP middleton's remarks. 

the Spirit, and the water, and the blood ; and these 
three agree in that one" (to "EN), 

Griesbach's text bears — " There are three that bear 
witness on the earth : the Spirit, the water, and the 
blood, and the three agree in that one" {to "EN). 

Here, without doubt, there is the most serious varia- 
tion, and, at the same time, that which is the most jus- 
tified by the testimony of the manuscripts that have 
been preserved down to the present day (more than a 
hundred and forty against three), as well as by the uni- 
versal silence of the Greek fathers. We should be 
travelling out of our subject were we to undertake to 
discuss here the historical testimonies ^ and the gram- 
matical considerations that plead, on the contrary, for 
retaining the old reading. We shall confine ourselves 
to these two remarks by Bishop Middleton : — 

1. Why is the word three^ the three^ in the masculine 
in the Greek {r^elg 6i fMct^rv^ovMrsg^ y.ai o'l Toeii\ while 
the words spirit, icater^ and bloody to which it relates, are 
all neuter (for it would have been necessary to say r^/a 
ra iJj(jLgT\)^o\)VTCL)1 This irregularity, which is fully jus- 
tified by what is called in grammar the principle of at- 
traction^ if the passage remains entire, becomes inexpli- 
cable when you would deprive it of the contested 
words. 

2. Wherefore, above all, this word, that one (rh tv, the 

never once imagined translating this passage otherwise than as we do. 
" No doubt (said the Arian bishop Maximin in the 5th century) the 
Son, according to the apostle, is not a petty God (non pusillus sed 
magnus Deus) but a great God, according to these words of Paul : 
Looking for" .... — (See Wordsworth's Six Letters to Granville 
Sharpe.) 

• That of several Latin fathers of the 2d, 3d, 4th, and 5th centu- 
ries; tliat of the Latin Vulgate, more ancient than the most ancient 
manuscripts of our libraries (supposed to date from the 5th or the 
close of tlie 4th century) : and, above all, that of the Confession of 
Faith publicly presented in 484, by four hundred bishops of Africa, 
to the king of the Vandals, who, as an Arian, persecuted them, and 
called on them to give an account of their doctrines.— See the Dis- 
Bertutions of Mill, Griepbach, Bengel, Wetstein, and Lee.) 



BISHOP MIDDLETON S OPINION. 193 

■ 

one), if some certain one have not beon spoken of in 
the preceding words? That expression (roh), in that 
case, would be without example. To this Bishop Middle- 
ton devotes eighteen pages in his beautiful work on the 
Doctrine of the Greek Article (in 8vo, Cambridge, 1828, 
pp. 606 to 624). " I cannot conceive," says he in con- 
clusion, " how this word, that one (rh h) can be recon- 
ciled with the taking away of the preceding words. 
I am aware that the greater number of the learned are 
favourable to these retrenchments; but, taking all things 
into view, I am led to suspect that, notwithstanding the 
immense labonrbestowed on this celebrated passage, some- 
thing more yet remains to be done in order to clear aAvay 
the mystery in which it is still involved." The learned 
Bengel, for still further reasons, said that the two verses 
of this passage remain united adamantind adhoerentid. 

Scholz has, like Griesbach, taken away the three 
heavenly witnesses. 

bih^ (Apoc. viii. 13) — Instead of^ " And I beheld and 
heard an angel flying," GriesbacKs text and that of Scholz 
bear, " And I beheld and heard an eagle flying." 

6th, (James ii. 18) — Instead of, " Show me thy faith 
by works," Grieshach's text and that of Scholz hear, 
" Show me thy faith without works." 

1th, (Acts xvi. 7) — Instead of, " But the Spirit suff"ered 
them not," GriesbacKs text and that of Scholz bear, 
" But the Spirit of Jesus suff'ered them not." 

Sth, (Ephes. v. 21) — Instead of , "Submitting your- 
selves one to another in the fear of God," Grieshach's 
text and that of Scholz hear, " Submitting yourselves one 
to another in the fear of Christ." 

Qth, (Apoc. i. 11) — Instead of, "I am Alpha and 
Omega, the first and the last," the text of Grieshach sup- 
presses these words, which it has retained, hoicever, at the 
^th verse, as well as at chapter xxii. 13. Scholz has 
made the same correction. 

lOth, (Matth. xix. 17)— Instead of "Why callestthou 
me good ? " Grieshach's text bears, " Why do you ask 
me about the good (or about happiness) ? " 



194 GRIESBACH AND SCHOLZ. 

• ' 

But Scholz does not admit this correction, and re- 
tains the old text. 

lltk^ (Philip, iv. 13) — Instead of ^ " I can do all things 
through Christ strengthening me," Grieshach's text and 
that of Scholz hear^ " I can do all things through him 
who strengtheneth me." 

\2th. Finally, (Acts viii. 37; ix. 5, Q -, x. 6), Gries- 
hach's text and that of Scholz suppress the S7 th verse 
and these icords, " It is hard for thee to kick against the 
pricks ; and he, trembling and astonished, said, Lord, 
what wilt thou have me to do ? " and^ " He shall tell 
thee what thou oughtest to do." 

No doubt, in these passages (I repeat), among the 
different readings which the manuscripts present, it will 
not be possible to know infallibly which is the one 
that ought to be regarded as the primitive text, or the 
very word given by God ; but, as to the meaning of 
the sentence, our uncertainties will always be circum- 
scribed within a very narrow and very clearly defined 
field. It is true, that choose I must between one word 
and another word — between one letter and another 
letter ; but there all my doubts are limited, there they 
stop: they are not allowed to go any farther. Not only, 
in fact, have I the assurance that the rest of the text is 
entirely from God; but I further know, that of the two 
different readings which the manuscripts present to me, 
one is certainly the inspired word. Thus you see how 
it stands : here my uncertainties can bear only on the 
alternative of two readings, almost always very much 
alike ; while, on the contrary, under the system of par- 
tial inspiration, the field of our doubts and of our per- 
plexities will have no bounds. If the language of tlie 
sacred hooks has been so far left to the ever fallible 
choice of linmaii wisdom — and if divine wisdom, which 
alone is infallible, have not controlled and guaranteed 
it — I am exposed incessantly to the temptation of ab- 
stracting something from it, modifying something in it, 
or adding something to it. 

Thus, then, have all the efforts of the adversaries of 



BENGF.L*S ALARM — HOW REMOVED. 195 

inspiration to shake our faith by attacks on this side, 
only served, as a last result, to confirm it. They have 
obliged the Church to foUoAv them in their investiga- 
tions, and soon thereafter to precede them in these ; 
and "^^•hat has she found in this pursuit ? Why this : 
that the text is still purer than the most godly men had 
rentured to hope ; that the adversaries of inspiration, 
and those of the orthodox dogmas, at least in Germany, 
have been compelled to admit it. After the labours of 
Erasmus, of Stephanus, and of Mill, tbey hoped to find, 
among all the manuscripts of our libraries, readings 
more favourable to the Socinian doctrines than those 
adopted by the Bezas and the Elzevirs. Many even 
thought that the uncertainties \^•ould become such, and 
the differences so serious, that all the positive evange- 
lical doctrines — exclusive, as they call them — would be 
shaken. But it has not been so. The process has now 
been brought to a close — the complainants have lost 
their cause ; the trial having been conducted at their 
demand by modem criticism, all the judges, on the 
benches of tbe Rationalists,^ have with one voice pro- 
nounced it a lost case, and tbat the objectors must go 
elsewhere to look out for arguments and complaints, 

When this question, respecting the integrity of the 
original text, presented itself for the first time to the 
excellent and learned Bengel, more than a hundred and 
twenty years ago, he was dismayed at the thought of it; 
it gave his upright and godly soul profound distress. Then 
did there commence on his part those labours of sacred 
criticism, which gave a new direction to that science 
among the Germans. The English had preceded the 
Germans in it ; but the latter soon got before them. 
At last, after long researches, Bengel, in 1721, happy 
and reassured, wrote to his disciple Reus: "Eat simply 
the bread of the Scriptures as it presents itself to thee ; 
and do not distress thyself at finding here and there a 
small particle of sand which the millstone may have 

1 Read Michaelis, vol. ii. p. 2(^6. Eichhorn, Einleitung, 2 th. S. 
700. Edit. Lips., 1824. 



196 ALL CHURCHES HAVE THE SAME GREEK TESTAMENT, 

left in it. Thou mayst, then, dismiss all those doubts 
which at one time so horribly tormented myself. If the 
Holy Scriptures — which have been so often copied, and 
which have passed so often through the faulty hands of 
ever fallible men — were absolutely without variations, 
the miracle would be so great, that faith in them would 
no longer be faith. I am astonished, on the contrary, 
that the result of all those transcriptions has not been a 
much greater number of different readings." The co- 
medies of Terence alone have presented thirty thou- 
sand ; and yet these are only six in number,^ and they 
have been copied a thousand times less often than the 
New Testament. 

How shall we not recognize the mighty intervention 
of God in this unanimous accord of all the religious 
societies of the East and of the West! Every where 
the same Scriptures! What distances separate Chris- 
tians from Jews in their worship! And yet, walk into 
our schools of learning, examine our Hebrew Testa- 
ments ; then go into their synagogues, ask their rabbis 
to show you their sacred rolls — you will there find the 
same books, without the difference of a letter I What 
distances separate, in their worship, the Reformed 
Christians from the members of the Roman sect ! And 
yet, pursue your search, you will find in our respective 
schools the same Greek Testament, without the differ- 
ence of an iota 1 We take theirs as they take ours — 
Erasmus or Beza, Ximenes or Mill, Scholz or Gries- 
bach I What distances, further, separate the Latin 
Church from the Greek Church — which also calls itself 
catholic, but orthodox, apostolic daughter of Antioch. 
and condemning the Romans as rebellious and schisma- 
tical sons I And yet, ask both for their sacred texts, no 
more will you find here any difference ; here the va- 
rious readings will not at all make two schools that 
distinguish them ; here the same manuscripts will be 
consulted — the priests and the pope, Munich and Mos- 

> Archives du Christianisme, torn. vii. No. 17. Wiseman's Dis- 
courses on the Relations of Science, &c., vol. ii. p. 189. 



ERRORS OF REASONING OR OF DOCTRINE. 197 

COW, will make you hear one and the same testimony. 
The necessary result, then, has been, that we all — 
Greeks, Latins, and Protestants — should have among 
us the same sacred book of the New Testament, with- 
out the difference of a single iota ! 

We have said enough on this great fact. We have 
felt it right merely to glance at it for the purpose of 
repelHng an objection, since it took us away from our 
subject. What we had undertaken was -to prove a 
doctrine — to wit, the primary inspiration of Holy 
Scripture ; and some have thought they could oppose 
us by urging, that, even were this doctrine true, it 
would be deprived of all effect by the alterations which 
Holy Scripture must have undergone. We behoved to 
show that these alterations are a vain and harmless 
phantom. While engaged in establishing a doctrine, 
we have already said, we have been led to write a 
history. We would now, then, return to the doctrine. 
Nevertheless, before returning to it, we must once more 
conclude, that not only was the Scripture inspired on 
the day when God caused it to be written, but that we 
possess this word inspired eighteen hundred years ago ; 
and that we may still, while holding our sacred text in 
one hand, and in the other all the readings collected by 
the learned in seven hundred manuscripts,^ exclaim, 
with thankfulness, I hold in my hands my Fathers 
testament, the eternal word of my God ! 



SECTION IV. 

ERBORS OP aEASONING OR OF DOCTRINE. 

We abandon the various readings, other opponents 
will say ; and we own that one may regard the sacred 
text as the original language of the prophets and the 
apostles. But this very text, intact as it is, we cannot 
study without being compelled to recognise in it the 

I Scholz has quoted 674 for the gospel alone. 



198 THE SCRIPTURES UNJUSTLY REPROACHED. 

part that has been taken in it bj human weakness. 
We find there reasonings ill conducted or ill wound 
up, quotations ill applied, popular superstitions, pre- 
judices, and other infirmities — all this being the un- 
avoidable tax which the simplicity of the men of God 
had to pay to the ignorance, on various points, of their 
times and of their condition. " St Paul," St Jerome 
himself has said,^ " does not know how to develop a 
hyperbaton, or how to conclude a sentence ; and as he 
had to do with rude, uncultivated persons, he has 
availed himself of conceptions which (if he had not 
taken care to let us know beforehand that he spoke 
after the manner of men) might have given umbrage 
to persons of good sense." Such, then, being the marks 
of human infirmity which we can trace in the Scrip- 
tures, it remains an impossibility to recognise in such 
a book an inspiration that has descended even to the 
smallest details of their language. 

To these charges brought against the Scriptures our 
reply is fourfold. 

1. First of all, we protest, with the utmost force of 
our convictions, against such reproaches. We main- 
tain, that a more attentive and a more serious study of 
the Word of God would reduce them to nothing ; and 
we protest, that they have no foundation but in the 
errors and the precipitation of those who advance them. 
This we could demonstrate, by repelling, one by one, 
all these charges, in each of the cases in which they 
have been sought to be renewed. It would prove a 
task more long than difficult, and we cannot find room 
for it here, for its details would be endless. There is 
not, in fact, a line of argument — there is not a quota- 
tion — there is not a doctrine — which the adversaries of 
the inspiration of the Scriptures have not at various 
times made a subject for reproaches ; and it is well 

1 Comment, on the Rp. to the Galatians (book ii.),to Titus (book i. 
on i. J), and to the Ephes. (book ii. on iii, 1.) 



INCONSISTENCY OF THE OBJECTORS. 199 

enough known that the greater part of objections that 
can be stated clearly in three words, require three pages 
for a clear refutation. It is necessary, therefore, that 
in proportion as the men of the world recommence 
their attacks, the Church should renew her replies; 
and that, like those respectful and indefatigable ser- 
vants who, among the Eastern nations, watch day and 
night near the face of their king, she stand constantly 
by the side of the Word of her God, to repel those 
swarms of objections, which are no sooner seen to be 
driyen off than they re-appear by another way, and 
incessantly return to plant some sting in it anew. Be- 
fore inquiry — and this the experience of all ages, and 
in particular that of these last times, has sufficiently 
shown — before inquiry, those difficulties which some 
would object to the Scriptures are smoothed away ; 
those obscurities burst into light ; and erelong unex- 
pected harmonies, beauties which no human eye had 
till then suspected, reveal themselves in the Word of 
God, by means of those very objections. Though to- 
day objects of doubt, to-morrow, when better studied, 
they would become to you motives to faith : to-day, 
subjects that distract and perplex you ; to-morrow 
they would become proofs to convince and assure you. 

2. Meanwhile we have no wish to evade any one of 
these charges brought against the Scriptures by the ad- 
versaries of the full inspiration of that sacred book, for 
it is an advantage which they give us. — Yes, and we 
are not afraid to say it : on hearing such objections, we 
feel ourselves at one and the same time under the too 
opposite impressions of satisfaction and of sadness ; of 
sadness at seeing persons who acknowledge the Bible 
to be a revelation from God, not afraid, notwithstanding, 
to bring so hastily the most serious accusations against 
it; and of satisfaction, from considering with what force 
such language confirms the doctrine which we defend. 

In the mouth of a deist, they would be objections, 
and we behoved to reply; but in that of the Christians 
19 



200 TEMERITY OP THE OBJECTORS. 

who advance them, thej involve a flagrant abandon- 
ment of their own proper principle, and an admission 
of all the evil to be found in that abandonment. 

Let us not be misunderstood : it is not at the bar of 
professed infidels that we here maintain the plenary 
inspiration of the Scriptures; it is before men who say 
that they hold the Bible to be a revelation from Ijod. 
Inspiration, we have told them, is a doctrine written 
down in that sacred book : according to its own testi- 
mony, all Scripture is given by inspiration of God; it 
is perfect, it is pure, it is silver seven times refined. 
"What has been their reply ? — They do not reject, they 
say, such an inspiration except with regard to the lan- 
guage, the forms of discourse and unimportant details; 
they believe, moreover, that a continual providence 
directed the minds of the sacred writers, to preserve 
them from all serious error. But how do they prove 
this position ? Is it to the language only, is it to the 
forms of discourse, is it to insignificant details, that they 
object? — Alas! let us hear their own words: In the 
doctrines there are superstitions ; in the quotations there 
are things misapprehended ; in the reasonings there are 
weak points ! — You see, then, it is thus that, in order to 
attack the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures, they 
descend into the ranks of the unbelievers who cast 
stones at the Word of God; and if they will not ven- 
ture, like them, to take away God from the Holy Bible, 
they would fain at least rectify God's errors in the Holy 
Bible. Which of these two attempts would be the most 
outrageous, it were hard to say. 

We conclude, therefore, that since it is impossible to 
combat plenary inspiration without charging the Word 
of God with error, we must necessarily cleave ever 
more and more to this sentence of Scripture, that *' all 
Scripture is given by inspiration of God." 

8. But we have to call attention to a still more seri- 
ous view of the matter. We ask, Wliere do they mean 
to stop in the course they have begun ? And by what 



WHERE WOULD THE OBJECTORS STOP ? 201 

reasons would they stop those, in their turn, who would 
fain advance farther than they are willing to go ? They 
make bold to correct one saying of God's Word; what 
right, then, have they to censure those who would rec- 
tify all the rest? Creatures of a day, during which 
they fleet through this world, with the everlasting book 
of God in their hands, they are foolhardy enough to 
say to him : This, Lord, is worthy of thee, this is not 
worthy of thee ! They make bold of themselves to sift 
God's oracles, to assign a share in them to the folly of 
man, to separate in them from the thought of the divine 
mind, proofs of ignorance shown by Isaiah and Moses, 
the prejudices of I^t Peter and St Jude, the paralogisms 
of St Paul, the superstitions of St John ! Lamentable 
temerity ! We repeat it : Where will they stop in this 
fatal task ? for they proceed to take their seats at the 
same table where the Socinuses, the Grimaldis, and the 
Priestleys occupy one side, and the Rousseaus, the 
Volneys, and the Dupuis the other. Betwixt them 
and Eichhorn, betwixt them and William Cobbet, 
betwixt them and Strauss, where will you find the 
difference ? It is in the species, not in the genus. It 
is in the quantity, and no longer in the quality, 
of imputations of error and tokens of irreverence. 
There is a difference in point of hardihood, none at 
all in point of profanation. Both pretend to have found 
errors in the Word of God ; both take it upon them to 
rectify it. But will they tell us, is it less absurd on the 
part of a creature to set about correcting in the works 
of God the creation of the hyssop that springs from the 
wall, than that of the cedar that grows on Lebanon ; to 
pretend to rectify the organism of a glow-worm than to 
send a supply of light to the sun ? What right have 
ministers, who say they see only the language of Jewish 
prejudices in what the Evangelists relate about the 
demoniacs and the miracles of Jesus Christ in casting 
out unclean spirits, — what right have they to think it 
strange that such or such another person should see in 
the miracles of the conversion of St Paul, of the resur- 



202 wirgmann's divarication. 

rection, of the multiplication of the loaves, or of the 
day of Pentecost, no more than an useful and sage 
complaisance for the ignorant minds of a people that 
were fond of the marvellous ? What right would a 
professor, who should deny the inspiration of the rea- 
sonings of St Paul, have to blame M. de Wette for 
rejecting that of the prophecies of the Old Testament,^ 
or M. Wirgmann for proceeding to his Divarication of 
the New Testament^ or M. Strauss, for changing into 
myths the miracles, and even the person of Jesus Christ ? 

Three or four years ago, a young Bernese minister 
gave us a reading of a manual of theology, which, he 
said, had been put into his hands in one of the acade- 
mies of Eastern Switzerland. We have forgotten the 
name of the author, together with that of his residence : 
but having at the time taken a note of his principal 
arguments against the plenary inspiration of the Scrip- 
tures, we can reproduce here the quotations by which 
he sought to prove that the sacred books, as they con- 
tained evident errors, could not be altogether the Word 
of God. The reader will understand that we cannot 
stop here to reply to him. All we wish to do is merely 
to give one an idea of the measure of these temerities. 

" St Paul speaks of ' having delivered an incestuous 
person over to Satan.' — (1 Cor. v. 5.) Could this pas- 
sage (fanatical no doubt) have been inspired ? " 

" He tells them that ' we shall judge the angels.' — (1 
Cor. vi. 3). A gnostic reverie, no doubt. Could such 
a passage be inspired ? " 

" He even goes so far as to tell them that, ' in con- 
sequence of their unworthy communions, many among 
them are sick, and some are dead.' — (1 Cor. xi, 30.) This 
passage cannot be inspired ! " 

1 This was his opinion some years a?;©. We know not whether 
this professor, whose leurnins? and candour we have admired in his 
translation of the NewTestainent, lias not withdrawn such assertions. 

2 This is tlie title of his book (translated from the Eiitrlish by 
Lambert, Paris, IHI^fJ.) " He says he understajids by it, the sepa- 
ration of the New Testament into Word of God or moral precepts, 
and nvrd of man or facts of the sensible world." 



ZURICH PREPARED FOR STRAUSS. 203 

" He tells them, further, ' that in Adam all die.' — (1 
Cor. XV. 22.) Judaical superstition ! It is impossible 
that such a passage can be inspired ! " 

"And when St Paul assures theThessalonians (iThes. 
iv. 15), which St James repeats (James v. 8), 'that the 
coming of the Lord draweth nigh,' could so manifest 
an error be inspired ? " ^ 

It is thus, then, that men dare to sit in judgment on 
the eternal Word ! We still remain unaware, we have 
said, if these doctrines, professed in Switzerland ten or 
twelve years ago, were so professed at Zurich more than 
elsewhere. But if they were actually in vogue there, 
then one must excuse, alas ! the magistrates of that 
city, if we would not deal unfairly by them. It was 
not they who called Strauss into their country, in order 
to subvert the faith of a whole people there ; for Strauss 
was already in their professors' chairs, if such teachers 
delivered their opinions from them. They had seen 
them with ample scissors in hand, cutting out from the 
Scriptures the errors of the apostles. What difference 
could they perceive betwixt such men and the man they 
called ? A little more learning, boldness, consistency, 
in following out his principles ; and in his more prac- 
tised hand, a longer and sharper instrument ; but hardly 
more heartfelt contempt for the Scriptures of God ! 
Among the judges of the Sanhedrim who smote Jesus 
on the face we should make little difference as to the 
number of blows they severally dealt; and when sixty 
conspirators in the palace of Porapey threw down 
Caesar from his throne of gold in the midst of the 
senate, .Casca, who first grazed him with his sword, was 
no less his murderer than Cassius, who clove his head, 
or than the sixty conspirators, who on all sides drew 

1 We have not felt ourselves called upon to ansvrer such charges. 
It would be going out of our subject. The Lord's coming is nigh to 
each of us : from one instant to another, three sighs Separate us 
from it. When a man dies he is immediately transported to the 
day of Jesus Christ. As for the distance of that day relatively to 
this w orld, see in the 2d chap, of tlie 2d. Ep. to the Thess. if the 
Apostle Paul deceived himself about it. 



204 VANITY AND IGNORANCE OF MAN. 

their swords on him, and pierced him with twenty-three 
wounds. Is the doctor, then, who denies the inspira- 
tion of an argument or of a doctrine of the Scriptures, 
less in revolt against the God of the Scriptures than the 
man who rejects the inspiration of a whole book ? We 
think not. 

We conclude, that since the man who denies the 
plenary inspiration of the Scriptures necessarily enters 
on the career of daring temerities, and gives the signa^, 
by the first thrust of his sword, for all the revolts that 
may follow against the Word of God, we must, once 
more, look more narrowly to that saying of the Holy 
Ghost : " All Scripture is given by inspiration of 
God." 

But we have one last reflection farther to make. 

4. You do not, it seems, comprehend the divinity, 
the propriety, the wisdom, the utility of such or such 
a passage of the Scriptures ; and, on that account, 
you deny their inspiration ! — Is this an argument that 
can have any real value, we do not say in our eyes, 
but in yours ? Who are you ? " Keep thy foot when 
thou goest into the house of God," feeble child of man, 
" and be more ready to hear, than to give the sacrifice of 
fools : for they consider not the evil that they do. Be 
not rash with thy mouth : God is in heaven, and thou 
upon earth." ^ Who art thou, then, who wouldst judge 
the oracles of God ? Hath not the Scripture itself told 
us beforehand, that it would be to some a stumbling- 
block, and to others foolishness ; ^ that the natural man 
receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, and that 
he cannot even do so, and that they are spiritually dis- 
cerned?^ Ought you not, thcrtibre, to expect to feel 
at first some repugnance in mind, in heart, in conscience, 
even to its first teachings? IMan must first return to 
his place as a weak, ignorant, and demoralized crea- 
ture! He cannot comprehend God until he has hum- 

1 Eccles. V. 1, 2. « 1 Cor. i. 23. « 1 Cor, ii. U. 



RECKLESS TREATMENT OP THE SCRTPTFRKS. 20.'> 



bled himself. Let him go and cast himself upon his 
knees in his closet ; let him pray, and he will compre- 
hend what it means ! An argument is ill grounded, 
because you do not seize its scope ! a doctrine is a pre- 
judice, because you do not admit it ! a quotation is not 
to the point, because its true meaning has escaped you ! 
"What would remain in the world, were God to leave 
nothing there but what you could explain ? The Em- 
perors of Rome, incapable of understanding either the 
lives or the faith of our martyrs, threw them to the wild 
beasts in the amphitheatre, and had their bodies drag- 
ged to the Tiber. It is thus that people strike their 
own defective knowledge, like an impure hook, into 
the "Word of God, and drag to the public dunghill 
whatever they have been unable to understand, and 
have condemned ! 

"While tracing these lines, we are reminded of a teacher 
of divinity, in other respects an honourable man, but 
imbued with the wisdom of his own age, who set him- 
self to prove that the reasonings of St Paul are not 
inspired. Now, how went he about to demonstrate this ? 
"Why, he quoted as a convincing example a passage 
(Gal. iii. 16) in which St Paul proposes, not to prove 
(mark this well — the whole solution lies here), not to 
prove, but to affirm that the promise made by God to 
Abraham and his posterity^ regarded not all his poste- 
rities (since it was evident enough that his posterities 
by Agar, by Keturah, by Esau, were rejected), but one 
special, elected and personal posterity. And what think 
you the professor did to establish his thesis on this pas- 
sage ? Why, he palmed on the apostle an argument so 
puerile, that the merest child among the Galatians 
might have reproved him for it! St Paul, according 
to him, instead of doing no more than affirm a 
fact, meant to argue froni the singular of a collective 
noun that such a Avord could designate no more than a 
single person ! Absurd as it is for us, said he, this 
argument might be good for the Jews, or for the gross- 
minded Gauls of Asia Minor. We give this example ; 



206 THE author's own experience. 

a hundred more of the same v-alue might easily be pro- 
duced. 

May the author venture here to refer to his own 
experience ? He recollects, with no less humiliation 
than gratitude, his earliest and his latest impressions 
on the Epistles of St Paul. He was enabled, from his 
earliest years, to come to the conviction that the Bible 
is from God ; but he did not yet understand the doc- 
trines which it teaches. He wished to respect the 
apostle's pages, because he saw, through other marks, 
that the not-to-be-counterfeited seals of the most high 
God are suspended there ; but in reading them he was 
agitated with a secret uneasiness, which drove him to 
other books. St Paul appeared to him to reason wrong 
— not to go straight to his point ; to discourse in a 
round-about and embarrassed manner; to wind about 
his subject in long spiral turnings, and to say the things 
that were attributed to him quite differently from what 
one himself would have washed to have done. In a 
word, he felt, in reading them, somewhat of the pain- 
ful discomfort of a tenderly affectionate son as he waits 
on a declining parent whose memory is beginning to 
fail, and who stammers in his attempts to speak. O 
how anxiously would he conceal from others, and dis- 
semble to himself, that his venerated father totters, and 
seems no longer to be himself! But no sooner had 
Divine grace revealed to us that doctrine of the right- 
eousness of faith, which is the burning and shining 
flame of the Scriptures, than every w^ord became light, 
harmony, and life ; the apostle's reasonings seemed 
limpid as the water that flows from the rock ; his 
thoughts profound and practical ; all his epistles a 
power of God unto salvation for those who l)tlieve. 
AVe saw abundant proofs of divinity shine forth from 
those very parts of the Scriptures which had h>ng «;iveu 
us such uneasiness ; and we could say, with the joy of 
one who has made a discovery, and with the gratitude 
of a tender adoration, as we i'c\t inimital>le, and until 
then silent, chords vibrate within us, in unison with 



ALLEGED ERRORS IN THE NARRATIVES. 207 

the Word of God, " Yes, my God, all the Scriptures 

are divinely inspired!" 

But people insist. 



SECTION V. 

ERRORS IN THE NARRATIVES. — CONTRADICTIONS IN THE FACTS. 

All those just repugnances felt to the reasonings or 
the doctrines of the sacred writers, will be abandoned, 
we are told, if it must be so, by admitting, that, on 
these matters, what is a difficulty for some may be none 
at all for others. But, if an appeal be now made to 
facts — if it be shown that there are manifest contradic- 
tions in the narratives of the Bible, in its dates, in its 
allusions to contemporary history, in its scriptural quo- 
tations — we might farther, perhaps, reproach those who 
object on the ground of having seen these, with not 
being consistent with themselves, and with going farther 
in this respect than their own thesis will admit. This, 
however, matters not ; these, if facts at all, are facts 
which cannot be thrown out on any such preliminary 
plea, and which no reasoning can destroy. Reasoning 
no more destroys facts than it creates them. If, then, 
it is added, these contradictions exist, they may, indeed, 
convict their thesis of not going far enough ; but they 
are three times more relevant against ours, in charging 
it with error. 

First of all, we acknowledge that, were it true that 
there were, as they tell us, erroneous facts and contra- 
dictory narratives in the Holy Scriptures, one must 
renounce any attempt to maintain their plenary inspira- 
tion. But we are not reduced to this : these alleged 
errors do not exist. 

We admit, no doubt, that, among the numerous at- 
tacks made on the smallest details of the narratives of 
our sacred books, there are some which, at first sight, 



208 SCRIPTURE IMPUGNED AND DEFENDED IN ALL AGES, 

may give some embarrassment ; but no sooner do we 
look at them more closely than these difficulties are 
cleared up and vanish. We proceed to give some 
examples of this, and will be careful to select them 
from among those which the adversaries of a plenary 
inspiration have seemed to regard as the most insur- 
mountable. 

These we shall preface with some observations. 

1. The Scriptures have in all ages had their adver- 
saries and their defenders — their Celsuses as well as 
their Origens — their Porphyries as well as their Euse- 
biuses — their Castellios and their Calvins. their Strausses 
and their Hengstenbergs. It is now sixteen hundred 
years since Malchus Porphyry, that learned and spite- 
ful Syrian, who lived in Sicily under the reign of 
Diocletian, and whom Jerome calls rahidum achersus 
Christum canem^ wrote fifteen books against Chris- 
tianity. In these fifteen books — the fourth of which 
was directed against the Pentateuch, the twelfth and 
the thirteenth against Daniel — there was one (the first) 
entirely devoted to the bringing together of all the con- 
tradictions which, he maintained, he had found in the 
Scriptures.^ From Celsus and Porphyry down to the 
English unbelievers of the 18th century, and from 
these down to Strauss, who has had hardly more to do 
than copy them,' unceasing endeavours have been made 
to discover more, by comparing Scripture with Scrip- 
ture, line with line, word with word, detail with detail. 
It was easy, therefore, to multiply them, and even to 
find some that were specious, in a book eminently 
anecdotic — where narratives of the same events are often 
repeated under difi*erent forms, by different historians, 

1 A rabid dog against Christ. Preface to his Eccles. writers. 

' T3» xaff itfjujf nrxivr,y viri(Qo\v fjur»v( w(»StS\ttfjUt»f, Bays Eusebius, in 
speaking of him. — Euseb. Prepar. Evangel., book x. ch. ix., and 
Eusebius' Eccles. Hist. vi. 19. 

a He says himself, that on tlie criticism of the gospels he had 
studied and collected from Celsus to Paulus, and even to the fnig- 
menta of Wolfeubiittel. 



ALLEGED COXTBADICTIONS. 209 

in different circumstances, with manifold oljects, and 
with more or less extensive developments After this, 
the reader must see that this fifth objecrion, which is 
composed altogether of detached oWrvaiions, and re- 
solves Itself into an infinity of minute details, can only 
be refuted in delaiL and by detached answers. The 
matter, accordingly, is inexhaustible. Every passage 
has its objection, and every objection its reply. Our 
sole general response, then, can only be this — Examine, 
and the obscurity will vanish. 

It is acknowledged, besides, by all parties, that the 
alleged contradictions, adduced by the adversaries of 
inspiration have not in themselves any religious im- 
portance, and bear only on dates, numbers, and other 
very minute circumstances. But though incapable of 
directly affecting Christian doctrine, they would tend, 
nevertheless, not less directly to subvert the plenary 
inspiration of the Scriptures. It is necessary, there- 
fore, that they should be met. This is what the friends 
of religion have done in all ages ; and this is what ]Mr 
Hengstenberg. at Berlin, has lately accomplished with 
such honourable success ; it is this, too, which has been 
done, in these last times, by Messrs Barrett, Hales, Ge- 
rard, Dick, Home, and otjiers, in England. 

2. It is very easy to say, in a general manner, and in 
a peremptory tone, that there are contradictions in the 
Bible ; and it has often happened that unreflecting 
though pious Christians have not taken the pains to look 
narrowly into the raatter, and have suffered themselves 
to be led away into loose maxims on inspiration, before 
having sufficiently studied, on one hand, the general 
testimonies of the Scriptures on that doctrine, and, on 
the other, the nature of the objections that have been 
opposed to them. Then it is that they have been 
seen to seek in their own minds, rather than in the 
Bible, for a mitigated system of inspiration, such as can 
be reconciled with the alleged existence of some errors 
in the Word of Grod. Here, in the sixteenth century. 



210 EXAMPLES OF ALLEGED CONTRADICTIONS. 

lay the doctrine of Socinus/ of Castellio,^ and some 
others ; but it was then loudly rejected by all pious men. 
^'•Hoc non est causam tueri adversus atheos" said Francis 
Turretine,^ " sed illam turpiter prodere." " Non est eo 
concedendum^ ad ea concilianda, ut dicamus codicem 
sacrum mendosum"^ said the learned and pious Peter 
Martyr, " the wonder of Italy," as Calvin called him. 
In our days, the estimable Dr Pye Smitli,^ in Eng- 
land, and the worthy bishop of Calcutta,^ have allowed 
themselves to run into statements of opinion which we 
deplore, and which they would probably correct had 
they to make them again. And at Berlin, the learned 
rector of the university, M. Twesten, whom, for his 
labours and reputation in other respects, we honour, 
has not been afraid to say, in his work on dogmatic 
theology,^ that all is not equally inspired in the holy 
Bible ; and that if we refuse to admit that there are 
errors in the details of the evangelical narratives, we 
throw ourselves into inextricable difficulties in our en- 
deavours to explain them. And what examples does 
he give, in passing, in justification of such maxims ? 
Why, he quotes two of the passages which we are about 
to expound, (the first, that of the blind man of Jericho, 
the seventh, that of the census taken under Cy renins). 
The reader may judge of the ease with which some can 
abandon the testimony which the Scriptures themselves 
render to their entire inspiration. 

"We proceed, then, to give some examples both of the 
contradictions which objectors have fancied they could 
oppose to us, and of the causes of the precipitation \>'ith 
which some allow themselves to call certain pa.'^sages 
contradictory ; which, however, only require a little re- 
flection in order to their being reconciled. 

We have said, and we repeat, that as it is out of our 

» De Autor. Script. • In Dialogis. 

« Th6ol. elenclit., torn. i. p. 74. * In Reir. viii. 17. 

• Defence of Dr llaffiier's Preface to the Hible. 

* Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity. 

1 Vorleeuugen uber die Dogmatik, t. i. pp. 401-429, lliiniburg, 1829. 



ILLUSTRATION FROM THE LIFE OF BONAPARTE. 211 

power to adduce more than a small number here, we 
have been at pains to select such as our adversaries have 
apparently regarded as the most embarrassing. 

I^Tn the interval between the first and second edition 
of this book, several pious persons have blamed us for 
having resolved difficulties which were not such to them, 
while we had neglected others which seemed to them 
of greater weight. Other readers will, no doubt, pass 
a directly contrary judgment on these relative values. 
Such appreciations are altogether subjective. None is 
judge of the importance that maybe attached elsewhere 
to his objections on such matters ; so that they present 
a boundless field. Still, however, we think it right to 
bring under consideration, in this volume, the new 
difficulties that have been pointed out to us.] 

First Cause of Precipitate Judgment. — The com- 
plement of the circumstances of two facts which hap- 
pened in the East, eighteen hundred years ago, remains 
unknown, because the sacred historians relate them to 
us with signal brevity. Some persons, nevertheless, 
should the narrative not explain to us in what man- 
ner some of their traits may be reconciled, are in 
haste to declare them contradictory. Nothing is more 
irrational. Suppose (to give an instance nc;t from the 
Scriptures) that a Hindu pundit happened to read three 
succinct histories, all three veridical, of the illustrious 
Napoleon. The first Avill tell him that the capture of 
Paris, preceded by much bloodshed at the gates of that 
capital, compelled him to abdicate; and thnt an Eng- 
lish frigate was commissioned to transport him to an 
island in the Mediterranean. A second will relate that 
this great captain, vanquished by the English, who 
made themselves masters of Paris without opposition, 
was transported by them to St Helena, whither General 
Bertrand desired to follow him, and where he breathed 
his last in the arms of that faithful servant. A third 
will relate that the fallen emperor was accompanied in 
20 



212 THE MEN SEEN AT OUR LORD's SrPULCHRE. 

his exile by Generals Gourgaud, Bertrarid, and Mon- 
tholon. All these narratives \vould be true ; and yet, 
how many palpable contradictions in these fv-w words! 
the learned man of Benares might say. St Helena in 
the Mediterranean ! Who knows not that it rises like 
a rock in the great ocean ? So much for a first con- 
tradiction : one of these books must be false; we must 
reject it. But again : Paris taken without a blow being 
struck ! and Paris taken after a bloody battle at the gates ! 
There is a second. Once more : here we find one general, 
there three generals! showing a third contradiction. 

Now, compare these supposed precipitate judgments 
with many of the objections that have been started 
against the narratives of our Gospels ! 

First example.' — Mark (xvi. 5) relates to us, that the 
women "^saw a young man (only one) sitting on the right 
side .... who said to them., Be not affrighted. Ye 
seek Jesus of Nazareth., who was crucified: he is risen." 

And Luke relates (xxiv. 4), that "xw^o men stood hy 

them who said to them., Why seek ye tJie living 

among the dead? He is not here., hut is risen" 

These passages are objected to as irreconcilable with 
each other ; but on what good grounds ? No doubt 
there is a difference ; but there is neither contradiction 
nor disagreement between the two narratives. If they 
are both true, wherefore would you insist on their being 
identical ? It is enough that they be true, particularly 
in histories so admirably succinct. Does it not often 
happen with us, that, without ceasing to be exactly ac- 
cordant with trutb, we tell, twice in succession to dif- 
ferent persons, the same adventure in two very different 
manners? Now, why should the apostles not do as much? 
Luke relates, that two personages presented themselves 
to the women ; while Mark speaks only of that one 
of the two who at first had alone roHed away the stone, 
who sat on the right side of the sepulchre, and who 
addressed himself to them. It was thus that one of our 
(supposed) historians of the Life of Bonaparte spoke 



TirE TWO BLIND MEN BY THE WAYSIDE. 513 

I . 

of three generals : while the other, without ceasing to 
be true, spoke only of Bertrand. It is thus that ]\Io?es, 
after having spoken of three men as appearing to Abra- 
ham at Mamre (Gen. xviii,), forthwith confines himself 
to speaking of one (ver. 2, 10, 17), as if he had been 
alone. It is thus that, twice in succession, and in a 
different manner, I may relate the same, circumstance, 
without ceasing to be true : " I met three men, who 
told me the right way. I met a man, who put me on 
the proper road." Thus, though there be in the pas- 
sages adduced a marked difference, still there is not 
even the semblance of a contradiction. 

Second example. — Matthew (xx. 30) says that as 
Jesus " departed from Jericho^ a great multitude foUoiced 
Mm. And., behold., tico hlind men, sitting hy the way-side., 
when they heard that Jesus passed hy., cried out., saying., 
Have mercy on its ! " 

And Mark (x. 46) tells us that " as Jesus icent out of 
Jericho icith his disciples, and a great number of people., 
blind Bartimeus., the son of Timeus, sat by the high- 
way-side begging. And when he heard that it was Jesus 
of Nazareth., he began to cry out., and say., Jesus., thou 
son ofDatid., have m,ercy on me." 

Luke likewise (xviii. 35) ^^e?iVs oi one blind man only. 

What is there here, we again ask, contradictory or 
incorrect ? Of those two blind men whom Jesus, amid 
so many other works, healed at Jericho, there was one 
more remarkable than the other, better known perhaps 
in the country, and who spoke for both. Mark speaks 
of him only ; he even goes on to tell us his name : he 
does not assure us that he was alone. Matthew, accord- 
ingly, might speak of two. The narratives of the three 
evangelists are equally true, without being like each other 
throughout. What, then, is there extraordinary in this ? , 

But, in this same narrative we are told there is a still 
greater difficulty ; let us hear it. 

This forms a third example. — Matthew and Mark re- 



214 DEATH OF JUDAS ISC A RIOT. 

late that the occurrence took place as Jesus departed 
from Jericho. 

Whereas Luke tells us that it happened as Jesus 
drew near to Jericho. Here, once more, people have 
been found to exclaim, What a palpable contradiction ! 

We must reply, How would you prove this ? what 
know you about it ? The details of this fact being un- 
known to you, how could you possibly demonstrate that 
they are irreconcilable ? While it is very easy, on the 
contrary, by the simplest supposition, to make them agree ? 

Luke, as he does so often in every part of his Gos- 
pel, has united in his narrative two successive circum- 
stances of the same event. Mark well that he is the 
only one of the three historians who makes mention of 
the first question put by Bartimeus : " And hparhig the 
vnultitude pass 5y, he asked ichatit meant'' This ques- 
tion the blind man put hefore the entrance of Jesus into 
Jericho. Being then made aware who this great pro- 
phet was, whom hitherto he had not known, he fol- 
lowed him, and during our Lord's repast in the house 
of Zaccheus, took his place in the crowd that w^aited for 
his coming out. It w^as then that there was announced 
to him that '•^ Jesus of Nazareth passed hy" (these words 
are in St Luke). He followed him long thus ; he was 
joined by the other blind man ; and their cure was per- 
formed only when Jesus, on his way to Jerusalem, left 
Jericho^ w^here he had stopped only for the purpose of 
being the guest of the happy Zaccheus. This very 
simple explanation instantly removes the alleged discre- 
pancy of the three texts. 

Fourth example. — Matthew (in his 27th chapter 
verse 5) says that Judas "• hayig(d hmiself;" St Peter, in 
the Acts (i. 18), says that ^'■falling headlong, he burst 
asunder in the midst, and all his ho icels gushed out." 

Here, again, we have been told, there is a contradic- 
tion. 

We remember that once, at a public conference at 
Geneva, where we defended this same thesis, our umch 



DISAGREEING NUMERICAL CALCULATIONS. 215 

valued fi-iend, professor Monod, at that time pastor at 
liVons, adduced the analogous traits of a lamentable 
death of which he had almost been witness. An un- 
happy inhabitant of that city, in order to make the 
surer of committing suicide, and to give himself a double 
death, having seated himself outside of a fourth-storey 
window, fired a pistol into his mouth. The same re- 
Jater of that sad event, said he might have given three 
different accounts of it, and all three correct. In the first 
he might have reported the whole that had happened ; 
in the second, he might have said the man shot himself; 
and, in the third, he threw himself from a window and 
was killed. 

Such, also, was the self-inflicted punishment by which 
the unhappy Judas departed into his own place. He 
hanged himself, and fell headlong ; he burst asunder, in 
the midst, and all his bowels gushed out. One single par- 
ticufar more on the frightful circumstances of one same 
death, would have showed us the connection. It has 
not been given to us ; but who will venture, on that 
account, to maintain that here there is a contradiction ? 

Fifth example. — Here ought to be placed the greater 
number of those cases where different numerical cal- 
culations may seem to disagree, such as that of the 
talents of gold brought from Ophir to King Solomon 
(1 Kings ix. 28 ; 2 Chron. viii. 18); that of the census 
taken of the Israelites in the days of David (2 Sam. 
xxiv. ; 1 Chron. xxi. 5) ; that of the children of the 
patriarch Jacob, transported into l^gypt (Gen. xivi. 27; 
Deut. X. 22; Acts vii. 14), &c. 

One single additional circumstance in these rapid 
narratives would have instantly furnished the reconcilia- 
tion required. King Solomon might, in the one case, 
reckon his gross revenues ; and, in the other, deduct 
thirty talents for the expenses of the fleet. David's cen- 
sus might present two results, according as the ordmary 
and already numbered militia of the kingdom was in- 
cluded or left out <' 288,000 men with their officers of all 



216 ALLEGED MISQUOTATION BY ST MATTHEW. 

ranks.) — (2 Chron. xxvii. 1 ; 2 Sam. xxiii. 8.) Finally, 
you might have sixtj-six, seventy, or seventy-five per- 
sons as the patriarch's family, according as you reckon 
in it, or do not reckon, on the one hand, Jacob with 
Joseph and his two sons ; on the other, Er, Onan, and 
Dinah ; or again, the wives of the eleven patriarchs. 
We enter not into the combination of these details ; we 
need only to point them out. 

Sixth example. — St Matthew, in his 27th chapter 
(verses 9, 10), quotes as those of Jeremiah words not to 
be found in the book of that prophet. " Then" says he, 
" Tjcas fuljilled that which was spoken hy Jeremij the fro- 
phet., saying., And they took the thirty pieces of silve)\ 
the price of him that was valued, whom they of the 
children of Israel did value." 

Here, it has been said, what an evident error . — .these 
words are met with only in the book of Zechariah 
(xi. 13). 

We do not answer, with Augustine, that as several 
Greek manuscripts have only these words, " Then was 
fulfilled that which teas spoken by the prophet" " one 
might say that the reference is to one -of those who did 
not bear the name of Jeremiah."^ It is true, that even 
at this day, among the Greek manuscripts of our lib- 
raries, there are two which have not the name of that 
prophet ; and that, among the most ancient versions, 
the Syrian and the Persian have it not. This solution, 
however, does not appear to us conformable to the ordi- 
nary rules of sacred criticism ; and Augustine him- 
self candidly admits that it does not satisfy him, seeing 
that, even in his time, the greater number of Latin 
copies, and of Greek copies, bore in this sentence the 
name of Jeremiah. 

Some learned men, consequently, presume that this 
name may have easily slipt into the text by some mis- 

• Possunius ergo dlcore Ina potius codicibus esse credendum qui 
JeremisQ nomen nou habeut. (De consensu Evaug. lib. iii. cup. f.) 



HOW IT MAY BEST BE EXPLAINED. 217 

take; and that the copyists, having noticed on the 
margin the letters Zou (signifying in abridgment the 
name of Zechariah), and having mistaken them for 
'low, had slipped it into the text, thinking what they sav7 
was the name Jeremiah. Meanwhile, even this expla- 
nation does not satisfy us any better, for it rests on a 
mere hypothesis gratuitously opposed to the testimony 
of the manuscripts, and opens a door for the admission 
of rash alterations. Our safety must ever lie in having 
the manuscripts respected. 

I prefer, therefore, Whitby's explanation, whict is as 
follows : — " We know," says he, " from St Jerome, that 
there was still extant in his time, an apocryphal book 
of the prophet Jeremiah, in which was found every 
letter of the words quoted by St Matthew."^ We know 
also that the Second Book of Maccabees (ii. 1-9) 
relates many of the actions and words of Jeremiah, 
which are taken from another book than that of his 
canonical prophecies. Why, then, might not the words 
quoted by the evangelist have been pronounced really 
by Jeremiah, and have remained in the memory of the 
Church to the days of Zechariah, who might then have 
again given them a place theopneustically in holy Scrip- 
ture, (as is the case with the unwritten words of Enoch, 
quoted in the Epistle of Jude,- or the unwritten words 
of Jesus Christ, quoted by St Paul in the Book of the 
Acts?)^ What confirms this supposition is, that part 
only of the words quoted by St Matthew are found in 
Zechariah. Besides, it is known that this prophet was 
fond of recalling the words of Jeremiah.* The Jews 
used to say that the spirit of Jeremiah was in Zecha- 
riah, and that the two prophets made only one. Mede 
thought it very probable that the 9th, 10th, and 11th 
chapters of Zechariah were written in the first instance 
by Jeremiah. Now, it is in the last of these chapters 

I Legi nuper, in quodam Hebraico volumine quod Nazarenae sectae 
Hebrasus rnilii obtulit, Hieremiae apocryphum, in quo haec ad ver- 
bum scripta reperi. (Hieron. in Matt, xxvii.) 

Verses 14 and 15. a Acts xx. 35. 

* See Zeeb, i. 4, and Jer. xviii. 11; Zech. iii. 8, and Jer. xxiii. 5. 



218 OUR lord's RESURRECTION. 

that we find the words quoted by St Matthew. That 
evangelist, therefore, could quote them as those of 
Jeremiah, in like manner as the apostle Jude has quoted 
as those of Enoch the words of his 14th and 15th 
verses. 

Seventh example. — Many difficulties have been started 
of late, especially in Germany, on the fourfold narrative 
given us of our Lords resurrection. 

For the sake of briefness we shall treat of the whole 
four accounts at once, taking care to distinguish them, 
in both objection and reply, by corresponding letters. 

A. According to St Luke (it has been said), the 
women of Galilee, on their return from the sepulchre, 
had prepared their spices before the Sabbath (Luke 
xxiii. 56) ; while according to St Mark (xvi. 1,2), they 
bought them only on the Saturday evening, after the 
expiration of that sacred repose. 

B. The reading of St Matthew gives us to understand 
that these women were Mary of Magdala and the other 
Mary ; while there must have been, besides, Salome, 
according to Mark (xvi. 1); and even, according to 
Luke (xxiv. 10), there must further have been Joanna, 
and others, with them. 

C. According to Mark (xvi. 2) they went to the se- 
pulchre " at the rising of the sun : " according to John 
(xx. 1 ) "it was yet dark." 

D. If (according to St ISIatthew alone) the Jews had 
set men to guard the sepulchre, one can hardly com- 
prehend how these women should risk visiting it, and 
think of opening it. 

E. According to Matthew (xxviii, 5) and IMark 
(xvi..')), the women saw only one angel at the sepulchre; 
they saw two according to St Luke (xxiv. 4). 



OrR LORD S RESrRRECTION. 219 

F. According to Matthew (xxviif. S) and Luke 
(xxir. 9, 1 0). the women, on departing from the sepul- 
chre, *' with fear and great joy," ran to tell the disciples 
what they had seen ; whereas, according to Mark (xvi. 
8),the_v fled ; •* thev trembled and were amazed ; neither 
said they any thing to any man, for they were afraid." 

G. If, according to the first and the third Gospels, 
the women informed the disciples of what had passed 
(Matt, xxriii. 8 ; Luke xxiv. 9), according to the 
fourtli, Simon Peter and John alone were informed. 

H. According to the three first Gospels. Mary of 
Magdala, on reaching the sepulchre, saw two angels, 
who informed her of the resurrection of Jesus ; while 
according to St John (xx. 2), she had contented herself 
with saying to the disciples, '• They hare taken away 
the Lord out of the sepulchre I " and said nothing either 
about his resurrection or eren about the angels. " We 
know not where they have laid him ! " she adds. 

I. According to Luke (xxiv. 12), it would appear 
that Peter, on being told, ran alone to the sepulchre ; 
according to John» there was with Peter '• that other 
disciple whom the Lord lored" (xx. 2). 

K. If you attend to the three first evangelists only, 
several women seem to have witnessed the appearance 
of the angels and the resurrection of Jesus ; while from 
reading St John, you would believe that Mary of 3Iag- 
dala alone was honoured with these revelations. 

L. According to Luke (xxiv. 23, 24), and even ac- 
cording to John (xx. 2), Mary and the women, on 
returning from the sepulchre, merely told the disciples 
of the removal of the body of Jesus, and of their having 
seen the angels ; they had not seen the Lord himself ; 
while according to Matthew (xxviii. 9), Jesus had 
appeared to them " while they were yet in the way." 



220 APPARENT CONTRADICTIONS EXPLAINED. 

Here, then, we are told there are eleven contradictions, 
which do not, it is true, affect the essence of the sacred 
narrative, and which ought not hy any means to affect 
our faith, hut which rise irresistibly to testify against 
the alleged fact of an entire divine inspiration. 

[^This objection, we will avow it, appeared to us too 
ill-founded, and to have been too often solved already, 
to find a place in the first edition of this work. Never- 
theless it has been reproduced against us, and we have 
thought proper to make a reply.] 

The day of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, for the 
disciples, began with the first da\ATiings of morning 
(John XX. 1), and was lengthened out to midnight 
(Luke xxiv. 29, 33, 36). The sepulchre where their 
Lord had been laid was not far from \\here they dwelt, 
seeing that at this day it is placed within the circuit of 
modern Jerusalem. Thus the disciples and the women 
may have repaired thither often, and in various ways, 
during the course of that incomparable Sunday. But 
as each of the four evangelists imposed on himself a 
marvellous brevity in relating that event, it is quite na- 
tural that at the first aspect their narratives should pre- 
sent, on the innumerable incidents of the day, an appa- 
rent confusion. Each was called upon to relate the 
truth, and nothing but the truth ; but none of them was 
bound to tell the whole; and owing to this conciseness, 
you may not at once perceive their perfect agreement. 
They relate, each for himself, according to one special 
point of view, and without embarrassing himself about 
a reconciliation which they knew lay in the reality of 
the facts. What more would you have ? One speaks 
specially of Mary Magdalene, for to her Jesus desired 
to make his first appearance; the other of Peter, because 
Jesus made himself appear to him notwithstanding liis 
crime, and because he was called to occupy a leading 
place in the Church of God; two others, of the astonish- 
ing meeting on the road to Emmaus, because that mani 
festation was the most significant and the most affect- 



BREVITY OF THE EVANGELISTS, 221 

ing ; three others, in fine, of his appearing to tlie eleven, 
because these were to be the foundations and the pillars 
of the Church. 

Moreover, you can perceive in their writings several 
fraits which sufficiently indicate that, in giving an 
account of certain scenes, they knowingly ahstain from 
mentioning others, the remembrance of which was no 
less dear to them, but which it was necessary to omit 
introducing, in order that their Gospels might be di- 
vinely short. Let us give some examples. 

1. You will hear St Paul reminding the Corinthians 
(1. Cor. XV. 5) that Jesus "was seen first by Cephas, 
and then by the twelve ; " — yet, not one of the four 
evangelists has told us of this appearance of Jesus to 
Simon Peter. Certainly it is Avell that it so happens 
that we read afterwards in St Luke (xxiv. 34) these 
words, said in passing, " The Lord hath appeared unto 
Simon." Without this expression (which occurs only 
casually in a conversation among the eleven and Cleo- 
pas), the adversaries of inspiration would not have 
failed to say that Paul was mistaken as to this tact, and 
that he had been a careless reader of his Gospels, seeing 
that not a word is said of this appearance in their four- 
fold account of the resurrection. 

2. It is thus, too, that St Luke, who (at the 12tli 
verse) speaks only of Peter, takes care, however, to 
make the disciples of Emmaus say afterwards, '• Cer- 
tain of them that were with us went to the sepul- 
chre." 

3. It is thus, also, that St Mark, who does not men- 
tion either the appearing of Jesus to the women or to 
Simon Peter, takes care, however, to insert in his ac- 
count (xvi. 9) a very few words which give us to un- 
derstand that there were other manifestations, of which 
he was not to speak. " Jesus," says he, " appeared first 
r first !) to Mary of Magdala." 



222 TARIOUS SUPPOSITIONS. 

4. Finally, it is thus that St John, whose sole pur- 
pose it was to complete the preceding Gospels, and who 
speaks only of Mary Magdalene, informs us, hy a simple 
pronoun^ that she, notwithstanding, was not alone : 
" They have taken away the Lord^ and we know not 

WHERE THEY HAVE LAID HIM." 

Thus, then, in order to establish contradiction among 
the ditferent parts of the quadruple statement, it were 
necessary that they should be proved irreconcilable with 
all the suppositions one must make on the unknown 
connecting links of the events of the day. But who 
can do this? On the contrary, it is easy to figure for 
ourselves the sequence of events in such a manner as 
that the separate details of the narrative should cume to 
agree with each other. This is what several persons 
have attempted with success, and in different ways ; so 
far is the problem from being incapable of being solved. 
All that was necessary for this, was to make different 
but equally admissible suppositions on the number and 
the sequence of the visits made to the tomb by Mary, 
the disciples, and the women. Olshausen, Hess, and 
Griesbach, reconcile the difficulties by assuming that at 
daybreak Mary of Magdala, while on the way to the 
sepulchre, parted from her companions, and arrived 
first. John Le Clerc figured to himself rather that 
Mary, coming to the sepulchre a second time, with the 
two apostles, remained longer than them near the tomb, 
and that the other disciples went home. Ilengsten- 
berg has made other suppositions, more simple perhaps, 
and not less acceptable. 

Such hypotheses, shall we be told, do not necessarily 
do away with the contradiction — they only show that 
possibly there may be none. What would we have 
more? The adversaries of inspiration only in their 
turn make contrary hypotheses. 

Now, th(m, instead of replying separately to each of 
the eleven ol)jections above adduced, we will content 
ourseWes with exhibiting]: the course of events, such as 



ALLEGED CONTRADICTIONS DISSIPATED. 223 

we may conceive it to have been, according to the four 
accounts taken as a whole. What we give is very nearly 
the arrangement proposed by John Le Clerc in his 
" Evangelical Harmony,"^ Others will prefer, perhaps, 
that lately proposed by Olshausen, in his " Biblical 
Commentary,"- or that which Hengstenberg more 
recently still has exhibited in his " Evangelical Ga- 
zette/'^ But it is of no consequence. Our account, it 
will be seen, dissipates, one after another, the eleven 
alleged contradictions. (The same letters that distin- 
guish them in the objection, Avill be re-inserted here 
before the particulars that correspond with them, and 
serve to solve them.) 

A. Jesus had yielded up the ghost on the cross on 
Friday evening, at the ninth hour of the day. The 
Sabbath, which began three hours later, was doubly 
solemn (being both the weekly and the paschal Sab- 
bath). As it grew late (Matt, xxvii. 46, 57 ; Mark xv. 
34, 42), Joseph of Arimathea went to ask from Pilate 
the body of the crucified one. He obtained it, and, ac- 
companied by Nicodemus, who saw to there being taken 
to the sepulchre about a hundred- weight of myrrh and 
aloes (John xix. 39) ; he bought a pall, had the body of 
Jesus taken down, wound it in linen clothes with the 
spices (John xix. 40), and wrapped it in a winding- 
sheet, (Luke xxiii, 53 ; Mark xv. 40 ; Matt, xxvii. 59) ; 
then at last, for want of time, he hastened to deposit it in 
a sepulchre not far from Golgotha. One will see, there- 
fore, that the godly women (who had beheld from a 
distance these funereal scenes, down to the moment 
when a huge st(me was placed on the entrance to the 
tomb), had very little time for going home and prepar- 
ing the perfumes which they had at their disposal. 
The Sabbath was about to commence; and whatever 
might be, in their eyes, the sacred nature of their occu- 

» Pas. 224-231. Lugduni, 1620. 

9 Zweiter Band, p. 517, Koeni<,'sberg. 1834. 

"- EvanKcl. Kirchen-Zeitung, Aug. 1841, § 489-623. 

21 



224 CONSISTENCY OP THE EVANGELICAL NARRATIVES. 

pations, they ceased from them from the time of sunset ; 
nothing could Avithdraw them from the repose and 
silence of that day (^r,o\jy^a6rM,^ Luke xxiii. 5Q). Buc as 
soon as it was over (that is to sa}% on Saturday at six 
o'clock at night), they ran to purchase aromatics to 
complete the pious preparations which they had been 
able only to commence. This funereal operation re- 
quired a very considerable quantity of myrrh, aloes, and 
other substances ; and, no doubt, in the evenings, they 
could not have seen, from such a distance, that Nicode- 
mas had already deposited in the sepulchre as much as 
a hundred-weight of perfumes. 

Thus far, then, all is perfectly consistent ; and it is 
by these touching details that Luke and Mark desired, 
each on his own side, to give prominence to the humble 
respect of these godly women for the law of the Sab- 
bath ; the one (Luke xxiii. 56), by showing how sub- 
missively they at once intermitted the most sacred cares; 
and the other (Mark xvi. 1), with what scrupulous 
attention they resumed them only at the hour when they 
were again at liberty to work. 

B. Meanwhile they left their homes to go to the se- 
pulchre. John names JMagdalene only, because Jesus 
Christ had chosen her to be the first witness of the 
greatest of his miracles, and because she was the essen- 
tial actor in his narrative. He takes care, however, to 
make her say, " We know not where they have laid 
him" (xx. 2) ! In general, the evangelists show little 
anxiety about accumulating testimonies. And if the 
appearance with which the holy women were favoured 
had not been the first, it is probable that the sacred 
historians would not even have mentioned it. This is 
what we might conclude, by analogy, from Paul's mode 
of proct^lure (1 Cor. xv. 5, 8), who spraks only of the 
apostles, and says not a word about the women. His 
complete silence sufficiently explains to us the partial 
silence of the evangelists.^ 

' This is a remark of Ilcnijstcnbcrg's. \Ve recommend his ilisser- 



OUR lord's resurrection. 225 

C. It was still almost night (John xvi. 1), when the 
women left their residence, carrying the spices, to go to 
the sepulchre {sig rh fivr^ixeiovy Mark xvi. 3) ; but the 
sun had risen on their reaching it (Jt; rh [jjV'i^iJ.eiov^ Mark 
xvi. 2). We know that in those southern latitudes, 
the evening and morning twilights are of very short 
duration. 

D. They asked themselves on the way how they 
should roll away the huge stone that covered the mouth 
of the sepulchral cave. — (Mark xvi. 3.) During the re- 
pose and the silence of the Sabbath (Luke xxiii. 5Q), 
how could they have known that guards had been ap- 
pointed? — (Matt, xxvii. 66 ) 

E. Meanwhile there had been an earthquake. — (Matt, 
xxviii. 2.) An angel, whose countenance was like 
lightning, and his raiment white as snow, had come 
from heaven and rolled away the stone. The guards 
were overcome with fear, and, after having become as 
dead men, fled. But what was not the astonishment 
of the women, when, on reaching the tomb, they found 
it open and empty ! Only one young man, clothed in 
white, sat in the sepulchre, on the right side. — (Mark 
xvi. 5.) Then two men presented themselves in shining 
raiment (Luke xxiv. 4) ; these were angels (Mark and 
Matthew mentioning only the one that had rolled away 
the stone, and spoken to them). 

F. Meanwhile, these holy women, hastening out of 
the sepulchre, fled, being overcome with feelings at once 
of terror and joy. — (Matt, xxviii. 8 ; Mark xvi. 8.) In 

tation to readers desirous of a more ample explanation. In order to 
, show, a priori, the improbability of the contradictions imputed to the 
Evangelists, he makes it certain that Mark had evidently Matthew's 
work before his eyes and John that of Luke. " An attentive com- 
parison," says he, " of Luke vii. 12 with John iii. 6-10 does not 
permit us to doubt this. John in order to make his narrative, which 
is more complete, clearly harmonize with that of Luke, borrows 
from him almost all the terms he had employed." 



226 OUR lord's resurrection. 

returning to the city they were careful not to speak to 
any one of what had happened. Did they dread the 
wrath of the Sanhedrim? At least, were they not un- 
willing to pour their emotions into the breasts of any 
but their brethren ? Notwithstanding the early hour, 
they must have met a great many Israelites in the lead- 
ing streets and squares of that immense city, where, 
during festivals, there were reckoned to be no fewer 
than three millions of inhabitants. The governor Florus, 
in the year 65, reckoned two hundred and fifty thousand 
paschal lambs, says Josephus ; and this supposes at least 
two and a half millions of worshippers, without in- 
cluding the sick, unclean persons, and young chil- 
dren.^ 

G. On arriving among the eleven and the other dis- 
ciples, the women told all that they had seen. — (Matt, 
xxviii. 8; Luke xxiv, 9.) But this recital seemed to 
them nothing but an idle tale. — (Luke xxiv. 10.) Then 
Mary of Magdala, addressing herself more particularly 
to Peter and John, assured them that, at least, if their 
Master were not risen again, he must have been taken 
away. — (John xx. 2.) 

H. According to the account itself of John, jMary 
must necessarily have said to those two disciples more 
than what that evangelist relates to us directly ; for he 
adds, that the^ ran to the sepulchre ; and that no sooner 
had John seen the arrangement of the linen clothes than 
he believed. But, alas ! this language of JMary : " They 
have taken away the Lord, and I know not where they 
have laid him!" was but too natural. The fleeting 
apparition of the angels had not produced so firm a 
conviction in her mind as not to have been violently 
shaken by the cold and incredulous reception her tale 
had met from the apostles. These men, according to 
whose directions she habitually conformed herself, had 

> Jewish Wiir, ii. 13. 



OUR LORDS RESURRECTION. 22? 

doubtless more than once repressed the warmth of 
her imagination. She saw them treat her heavenly 
vision as a mere revery. After that, she felt only enough 
of confidence in herself to attest the ordinary and ma 
terial part of the fact. At least, says she, the tomb is 
open, and the body is no longer there. 

I. Nevertheless, on hearing these words, and whilst 
Cleopas went awa}'' to Emmaus, Peter rose, Luke tells 
us (xxiv. 12), and ran to the sepulchre, but he did not 
run thither alone (24) ; and John tells us that he was 
accompanied by that "other disciple whom Jesus loved." 
— (John XX. 2, 3.) John being the younger, arrived first; 
he did not go in ; but stooping down he saw the linen 
clothes lying on the ground. Peter, stooping also, saw 
the linen clothes lying (Luke xxiv. 12), and the napkin 
that was about his head not lying with the linen clothes, 
but wrapped together in a place by itself. He had the 
courage to go in, and wondered at what had come to 
pass (Luke xxiv. 12) ; but John did more; he entered 
in his turn and believed. They then departed unto 
their own home. — (John xx. 10 ; Luke xxiv. 12.) Still 
there is nothing inconsistent in all this. 

K. Meanwhile, Mary of Magdala, who had followed 
them, having returned to the sepulchre, remained alone 
at the spot, weeping and disconsolate at not even being 
able to find again her Master's remains. She stooped 
down to look into the interior of the sepulchre, and 
then it was that anew two angels clothed in white 
presented themselves to her sight. They were seated, 
the one at the head and the other at the foot of the place 
where the body of Jesus had lain. — (John xx. 11, 13.) 
Soon after, Mary having resumed her position, it was 
Jesus himself whom she saw behind her. " Go," said 
he to her, " to my brethren, and say unto them, I 
ascend unto my Father and your Father, and to my 
God and your God!" Mary hastened to go and tell 
the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and that he 



228 OTJR lord's resurrection. 

had spoken these things to her (John xx. 18) ; but they 
beiie^ed not — (Mark xvi. 10.) 

Thus, then, was it, as St Mark has said (xvi. 9), that 
Jesus appeared ^r,9< to Mary of Magdala. 

The whole of this narrative is natural and harmoni- 
ous ; the historians here agree together in a manner 
which it is easy to comprehend. Only they relate each 
some one of the great facts of that incomparable day, 
without considering themselves called upon to relate the 
whole. 

L. The two disciples on their departure from Jeru- 
salem for Emmaus (Luke xxiv. 21, 24), were as yet 
unaware of the events of the day beyond the first report 
of the women and of the two disciples, the opening of the 
sepulchre, the removal of the Lord, the appearing of the 
angels ; but they had not yet learned the last news — 
the appearing of Jesus to Simon — Peter and Mary's se- 
cond report. — (John xx. 18; Mark xvi. 10.) Mark, 
however, what had afterwards happened. Follomng 
the Magdalene's example, who had returned a second 
time to the sepulchre, after having informed the apostles 
of her first discoveries, the other women also had be- 
taken themselves thither while Mary was returning to 
the disciples ; they had found the tomb empty ; and, 
as they were returning to give a farther attestation 
to their brethren that the body of Jesus could not be 
found there, Jesus himself had condescended to appear to 
them alive and full of sympathy. They had worshipped 
him, and he had said to them : " Be not afraid : go tell 
my brethren, that they go into Galilee, and there shall 
they see me." — (Matt, xxviii. 9, 10.) 

Such is the harmony of the sacred narratives. This 
concatenation seems to us satisfactory. ( hie might, as 
we have said, propose some other ; but this is enough. 
AVe must confess that we cannot understand the diifi- 
culties that have been found in it, or the noise that has 
been riiade about it. 



FURTnER EXAMPLES OF PRECIPITATE JUDGMENT. 229 

Another SOURCE of precipitate judg:\ient.-- CertaiE 
reigns, such as that of Nebuchadnezzar, that of Jehoia- 
chim, and that of Tiberius, had two commencements ; 
and the dates that relate to these are pronounced irre- 
concilable ! The first, previous to mounting the throne, 
reigned three years with his father ; the second reigned 
ten years with his ; the third was assumed by Augustus 
as his associate in the empire, from the 28th of August, 
of the 2d year of the Christian era, but succeeded him 
on the 1 9 th of August, of the year 14. — (Yelleius Pater- 
culus, ii. c. 121.) 

Some examples, — See, for Jotham, 2 Kings xv. 33, 
(he reigned sixteen years alone ; but four years also 
during the lifetime of his father, who was leprous). 
See for Joash, 2 Kings xiii. 1, 10, (he must have 
reigned two or three years with his father, as did Jeho- 
shaphat and his son, 2 Kings viii. iQ.) See 2 Kings 
xxiv. 8 ; and 2 Chron. xxxvi. 9. See also Daniel i. 1 ; 
Jer. XXV. 1 ; 2 Chron. xxxvi. 5-7. See farther, Luke 
iii. 1. 

Another source of precipitate judgment. — The 
design of the Holy Ghost in one of the Gospels, is not 
often the same as his design in another Gospel while 
relating the same fact ; yet some would have them all 
give the same turn to their narratives ; nay, make bold, 
because of their differences, to declare tiiem irreconcil- 
able, and to assume that they are directly opposed to 
each other. 

Example. — The Holy Spirit, in the genealogy of 
Jesus Christ, given in St Matthew (i. 16), would show 
the J exes., that, according to the strict rigour of their law, 
Jesus Christ is the son and the heir of all the kings of 
Judah, by a legal descent ; while the same Holy Spirit, 
in the genealogy given by St Luke (iii. 23-38), would 
show tlie Gentiles that Jesus Christ is the Son of David 
by a natural descent. And because, with this double 



230 RASH ADOPTION OF MISTRANSLATIONS. 

object in view, they give us, the one his genealogy ac- 
cording to the law, by Solomon, the son of Da^nd, and 
by Jacob, the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary; 
and the other, his genealogy according to nature^ by 
Nathan, another son of David, and by Heli, the father 
of Mary, people have thought, very absurdly, that they 
could make the one refute the other I-"^ 

Another source of precipitate judgment. — A 
text mistranslated produces a meaning that is contrary 
to reason or to history ; and forthwith the sacred writer 
is accused of committing the grossest blunder ! People 
don't examine whether, in the simplicity of a literal 
translation, the same passage, better rendered, would 
not present itself free from every difficulty ! 

First example (again one of those adduced by M. 
Twesten). — St Luke, we are told (ii. 1), has no sooner 
spoken of the taxing ordained by a public decree issued 
by Augustus Caesar, at the time of the birth of Jesus 
Christ, than he adds these words at verse 2 : '• This 
taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of 
Syria." 

Hence it would follow that St Luke is here caught in 
flagrant contradiction with contemporary history ; for, 
at the birth of Jesus Christ, Judea was governed by 
Herod, and Syria either by Saturninus, or rather (from 
the seventh year of the Christian era) by Quiutilius 
Varus, who replaced him, and during whose adminis- 
tration the death of Herod the Great took place The 
Cyrenius (Publius Sulpicius Quirinius), under whom a 
second census took place, was not sent to the Ea<;t until 
eleven or twelve years, at the least, after the birth of 
Jesus Christ. The historian Josephus' tells us in ex- 

1 This difficulty is hardly any loii'.'cr insisted on. We can do no 
more hore timn point to i\\c solution of it. Its exposition requires a 
develoimieiit whicli would be inadmissible in these pages. It may 
be eusiiy found elsewhere. 

• Aut. Jud., xvii. 1."), xviii. 3. 



CYRENIUS, GOVERNOR OF SYRIA. 231 

press terms, that this census took place the thirty-seventh 
year after the defeat of Anthony ; and Jesus Clirist was 
born, at the latest, the twenty-sixth year after that great 
event. Luke, then, must have made a mistake of ele- 
ven years, and must have confounded these two epochs 
and these two censuses. 

Before replying to this strange accusation, we would 
have the reader observe its extreme improbability, even 
taking St Luke to have been a mere uninspired man. 
What ! Luke, the only one of the evangelists that was 
a person of erudition — Luke, the physician — Luke, who 
subsequently resumes the mention of the census of Qui- 
rinius, when he recalls that famous revolt of Judas the 
Galilean, which stirred up all Judea and caused the de- 
struction of a great many people, who perished along 
with him ^ — Luke, writing for all nations, and in four 
and twenty pages, an historical work, which he knew 
would be immortal — Luke could make such a mistake 
as to place in the days of Herod the Great so very seri- 
ous an event which had happened wdthin the preceding 
thirty years ! What should we say at the present day 
of a physician, who, even in a simple conversation, 
should put the battle of Austerlitz in the days of Ca- 
therine II. and of the National Convention ? And if 
this doctor were to publish a short narrative, in which 
such an absurdity should be found, what reception, 
think you, would he find even among his most unlet- 
tered contemporaries ? 

It is thus, then, that often, when people would make 
the sacred writers contradict themselves, they scruple 
not to impute to them such silliness as would be almost 
miraculous. 

But let us return to the passage. There is nothing 
simpler than its translation : it is a parenthesis. Ac- 
cording to the accent placed on the first word (aur*;), it 
becomes either a demonstrative pronoun, or a pronomi- 

» Acts V. 37. 



232 OUR lord's temptations. 

nal adjective ; and, in this alternative, the phrase ought 
to be translated literally^ in the former case, by " This 
first census" and, in the latter case, by "• Thefi,rst census 
itself!' It is in this latter sense that the word has been 
rendered by the authors of the new version, published 
some months ago by a society of ministers in Switzer- 
land,-^ and it is that also which we think ought to be 
adopted. 

Thus, then, there is nought but what is quite natural 
and quite correct in St Luke's narrative. After having 
spoken in the first verse of a decree from Augustus, 
which began to be executed under Herod's reign, he in- 
timates (in the parenthesis of verse 2) that one must not 
confound what was done then with the too famous cen- 
sus of which all Judea still retained so tragical a recol- 
lection. The first census itself says he, was effected 
while Cyrenius was Governor of Syria. Such is the 
plain literal translation of the Greek.^ 

Second example. — St Matthew (iv. 5), immediately 
after the first temptation, says, that " then the devil led 

Jesus into the holy city." And when this second 

temptation was over, he adds (v. 8), in beginning to 
relate the third, that " again the devil taketh him up into 
an exceeding high mountain" &c. 

St Luke, on the contrary (iv. 5), immediately after 
the first tempation, says, that " then took him up into an 
high mountain ;" and when this second temptation was 
ended, he adds, in beginning to tell of the third, " He 
brought him also to Jerusalem,.''* .... 

Here, then, we find two of the evangelists manifestly 
at variance as to the order in which the three tempta- 
tions took place. One of the two must of necessity 

1 Lausanne, J 839, p. 105. 

> Others, taking irqum in the sense of w^ori^a. as in the w^Si^ fuu h 
of John the Baptist (John i. 15, 30), translate, "This census took 
place before Cyrenius was governor of Syria." This translation 
would still be legitimate, though perhaps less natural, because the 
Greek, with this meaning, would less resemble St Luke's ordinary 
Btyle. 



MISTRANSLATION CORRECTED. 283 

have been mistaken in putting the last before the second. 
Such is the objection. 

You Avill see this difficulty equally vanish as soon as, 
instead of following Osterwald's version or Martin's, 
you seek only to o^ive a more faithful rendering to the 
original text. \Ve might here adduce a good many 
other passages (chiefly in the Epistles) -which these two 
translators have darkened, by not sutficientlv marking 
the import of the conjunctions and adverbs xa/', 5=, yao, 
oui/, TOTS, Sec. 

Every one knows ^ that St Luke, in writing his Gos- 
pel, did not restrain himself to the order of time, and 
that he had proposed to himself in his narratives to 
group together events and lessons rather according to 
the order of things (xa^sg-^^). Both these methods of 
writing biography have their advantages. Among 
heathen writers, for example, Nepos has followed the 
first, and Suetonius the second. It was necessary, 
therefore, that the translators of St Luke, marking well 
his language, should not make him appear to use ad- 
verbs of time, order, or events, which he had no 
thought of employing, and which come in much out of 
place to alter the meaning of what he has to say. Re- 
establish here the conjunctions of the Greek, and you 
will see forthwith the contradiction which the two 
French texts had presented to you disappear. 

St Matthew, who always follows the chronological 
order of the facts, takes care to employ very exact ad- 
verbs in proportion as he advances in his account of the 
temptation ; tots, tots, craX/v, tots, tots, t/ien, tlien, anew, 
then, then. But Luke, on the contrary, who had not 
proposed to himself to follow the same course, and who 
confines his intention simply to letting us know the 
three attacks to which the Son of God behoved to sub- 
ject his holy humanity, studiously abstains from using 
any adverb of order or of time, and contents himself 

i See Home's Introd., vol. ii. p. 3, book 2d, § 4. 



234. SOME ACTS AND SAYINGS REPEATED. 

with coupling, ten several times, the facts of his narra- 
tive by the copulative and (xa/), which our translations 
have so improperly rendered by the adverb alors, or 
ENSUITE (English, THEN, or afterwards.) 

The contradiction then does not belong to the sacred 
text.^ 

Another source of precipitate judgment. — It 
has not been sufficiently borne in mind, that certain dis- 
courses and certain acts were repeated more than once 
in the course oF our Saviour's ministry. Hence the 
utmost rashness in concluding that certain detailed 
accounts given by two evangelists contradict each other, 
where there has been no more than an incomplete re- 
semblance, and yet where people have imagined that 
the facts they read of were identically the same. 

Examples. — Tn the double miracle of the multiplica- 
tion of the loaves, we have a very striking instance of 
the ease with which one may in this way be led into 
error. On two occasions Jesus Christ, moved with 
compassion for the people, fed a famished multitude in 
the wilderness. Between these two miracles there are 
numerous and striking points of resemblance. Had it 
so happened that two of the evangelists had related only 
the first, and two other:-* only the second, there would 
have been sure to be a cry that the two were but one, 
and that there was a contradiction in the statement of 
their details. What ! in the one, five thousand men fed 
with five loaves ; in the other, four thousand men fed 
with seven loaves ! In the one twelve baskets (xozhovc) 
taken away; in the other, seven hampers {6~vpida;)\ 
What a disagreement ! Well it is that if Luke and John 
have meniioned the first only, Matthew ami Mark, uho 
relate the second, have also reported the first. But for 
this what a noise would not our adversaries have raised 
in the schools about such a passage ! 

' In the first edition of this work, we corrected her." the faulty 
interpretiition srivoTi of Job xxxvii, 8, We have euppresscd it only 
to make room for other objectionB. 



THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. 235 

This remark may be applied to several particulars of 
the New Testament; for example, to the Lord's prayer, 
which was given twice, at least, to the disciples during 
our Lord's ministry. — (Matt. vi. 9 ; Luke xi 2). 

See also Matt. xii. 39, and xvi. 1, 4; Luke viii. 21, 
xi. 27, and Matt. xii. 49; Luke ix. 1, x. 1, and Matt. 
X. 1. 

TVe shall adduce one further example. 

It does not appear, on close examination, that the 
sermon called that of the mount (Matt, v, vi. vii.), and 
that given by St Luke in the latter half of his sixth 
chapter, were delivered on the same occasion.^ In fact, 
first., St Luke omits many of the sentences reported by 
St Matthew,^ and he alone adds some others (vi. 24-26); 
secondly, Matthew lets us know, that the sermon which 
he reports preceded the healing of the leprous person 
(viii. 3), and Luke that his followed it (Luke v. 12); 
thirdly., Luke puts Matthew in the" number of those 
whom Jesus called to the apostleship, and who came 
down with him from the mountain, before he addressed 
to them his discourse ; whereas Matthew himself tells 
us, that the sermon of which he speaks, long preceded 
his vocation ; fourthly., one of those discourses was de- 
livered on the mountain., while Jesus, who had sat 
down, had his disciples ranged around him ; the other, 
on the contrary, was delivered on the plain, and with 
other ciicuuT^tances attending it. TVe pause at this 
remark, in order to reassure such persons as may 
have heard adduced against the doctrine of inspira- 
tion, the alleged contradiction of the sentence in which 
j\Iatthew (v. 40) makes Jesus say, " If any man Avill 
take away thy coat (;//rwi/a), let him have thy cloak 
(//xar/ov) also;" and of that in which, according to 
Luke, he had said, " Him that taketh away thy cloak, 
forbid not to take thy coat also."' One can no more, 
then, we say, make an objection of this diversity, see- 

» See Whitby on Matt, v. 5. 

« For example, Alatt. t. 13, 39. The whole 6tb and 7th chap., 
6-16. 3 Luke vi. 29. 

2i2i 



236 VARIOUS READINGS RASHLY REJECTED. 

ing these two sentences were pronounced on dijfferent 
days. 

Nevertheless, we must not forget, at the same time, 
to observe, inasmuch as this remark applies to several 
other objections of the same nature. Even were it true 
that these two passages were cited as the same frag- 
ment of one and the same discourse, still their differing 
would not have anywise astonished us. We believe 
that the Holy Ghost, when he quotes the Holy Ghost, 
is not bound to use the same terms, provided the same 
meanings be retained. A man of an exact mind, iu 
repeating what he has said before, or in quoting him- 
self, by no means thinks himself bound to carry imita- 
tion thus far. And we think, that here our Lord's 
whole idea is found equally in the sentences of Luke 
and Matthew. 

Another source of precipitate judgment. — One 
may sometimes pay no attention to a xarious reading 
critically respectable, and which resolves a difficulty; 
and prefer imputing some contradiction to the sacred 
writer. 

Example. — According to the three first evangelists 
(Mark XV. 25, 83, 34; Matt, xxvii. 45, 4G; Luke xxiii. 
44, 45), our Saviour was put upon the cross at the 
third hour of the day (that is to say, at nine o'clock 
in the morning); the sun was darkened at the sixth 
hour, and Jesus gave up the ghost at the ninth liour ; 
whereas, if we are to believe St John (xix. 14), the 
execution did not begin until the slvth hour of the day 
(at noon). Palpable contradiction! say some objec- 
tors. 

Before replying to this difficulty, we shall offer a 
remark, much like that already made on the census of 
Cyrenius. Was it liicely that the apostle John wa3 
ignorant of the length of time that his Master's execu- 
tion lasted, and could he possibly have made a mistake 



MEANINGS RASHLY MISAPPREHRNDFD. 237 

of three hours out of six — he who had remained beside 
the cross ! 

But, if we consult the Greek manuscripts of St John, 
we shall find four in small letters, and three in uncial 
letters (among others, Beza's famous roll, preserved at 
Cambridge), which have here the third hour instead of 
the sixth. Numbers, in the Greek manuscripts, are 
often expressed in numerals ; that is to say, in simple 
Greek letters; and 3 and 6 are expressed by two letters 
that are very easily confounded (the ^a/x/xa and the 
lit'icriijjov) : several of the ancients thought that the va- 
riation might have arisen from this cause. Griesbach, 
who has marked this variation with a sign of preference, 
quotes Severus of Antioch and Ammonius in Theo- 
phylact ; and he adds, that the Chronicle of Alexan- 
dria appealed, in favour of this reading, to the best 
copies, and even to the original autograph (J^ioyii^'j)^ 
of the Gospel of St John. 

Another source of precipitate judgment. — Peo- 
ple fail to seize the meaning of certain particulars 
in a narrative, and hasten to conclude that the author 
was mistaken ! 

First example. — Jesus, in St Matthew (xxiii. S5^ 36), 
denounced the most terrible judgments of God on the 
Jews, on account of the treatment they had given his 
saints, " in order," says he, " that upon this race (or this 
generation, yivzav) may come all the righteous blood 
shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel 
unto the blood of Zacharias, son of Barachias, whom 
ye slew between the temple and the altar ! " 

Here, certainly, we are told, there is an awkward in- 
advertence, not on the part of Jesus Christ, no doubt, 
but of the evangelist who reports these words, and whose 
memory must have failed him. We know, from the 
Second Book of Chronicles (xxiv. 21), that this Zacha- 
rias, who was stoned to death by the Jews in the holy 
place (h^'SJ), was the son, not of Barachias, but of Je- 



238 ZACHARIAS, SON OF BARACHIAS. 

hoiada. Here, then, there is an evident error. It 
does not affect doctrine, and cannot in the sh'ghtest de- 
gree disquiet our faith; but it suffices to attest, that the 
divine inspiration has not descended, as has been main- 
tained, to the choice of expressions, or to matters of 
indifference, in the inspired narratives. 

The answer is simple ; would we could make it as 
short as it is conclusive. We shall first briefly state 
what it is. The Zach arias here is not the Zacharias 
you speak of: the Evangelist, therefore, has made no 
mistake in not naming him, for he was not thinking of 
him. Is there not, in fact, a maniest incompatibility 
in such a supposition with the idea that occupied our 
Lord's mind ? Was it not his purpose to recall the long 
succession of homicides for which the Jewish race will 
have to render an account ? And when he takes his 
first instance of murder from times preceding the flood, 
at the gate of paradise, to make them accountable for it, 
you would have him think it enough to adduce as the 
last, a crime committed above eight centuries before ! 
After commencing with a son of Adam, can you 
imagine that he could end with the son of Jehoiada ; 
thus holding the Jews innocent of the blood shed, dur- 
ing the 873 most scandalous years of their history ? 
Would it not have been more rational to begin rather 
than to end with Jehoiada ? Were not the Jews far 
more responsible for the murders they had committed 
during the last preceding nine centuries of their history, 
than they could be for blood shed before the deluge ? 
Had they not persecuted, for example, and slain with 
frightful atrocity the prophet Urijah, 240 years after 
Jehoiada? — (Jer. xxvi. 23.) " AVhich of the pro- 
phets," said St Stephen to them, " have not your fathers 
persecuted ? They have even slain them which showed 
before of the coming of the Just One !" — (Acts vii. 52.) 
In this passage of St Matthew, then, it is not the son 
of Jehoiada that is spoken of. 

Here our reply might close ; but we shall no doubt, 
be a&ked, Who then was the Zechariah spoken of by 



DIFFERENT ZACHARTAHS. 239 

Jesus Christ ? Even although we did not know,, this 
would by no means be a difficulty, and we should content 
ourselves with replying : It was some just person whom 
the Jews slew, not only in the court of the temple (sv ruJ 
h^'Sj) like the son of Jehoiada, but heticeen the temple (roii 
vaov) and the altar ;" and this just person Avas son of 
Barachias ! Nevertheless, one may go further still ; 
for history speaks of two or three other Zachariahs, sons 
of Barachias (Ba^ap//o'j or Ba^o'jp/6i»), among whom the 
learned divide their suffrages. 

The first was a man who had understanding in the 
visions of God {as he is called in the second book of 
Chronicles),^ and who is believed to be the same as he 
that is spoken of by Isaiah, in his 8th chapter.^ Be 
that as it may, he lived too short a time after the son of 
Jehoiada, for our objections against the one not to be 
equally valid against the other. 

The second is the prophet " Zachariah, the son of 
Berechiah, and the grandson of Iddo" (Zech. i. 1), who 
returned from Babylon with Zorobabel, 325 years after 
the days of Jehoiada, and whose writings form the se- 
cond last book of the Old Testament. 

The Scripture, it is true, has not related his martyr- 
dom to us, any more than that of the other prophets, 
who were almost all persecuted and put to death. But 
the temple and the altar were rebuilt by his care, as well 
that of Haggai (Esdras iv. 14, 15) ; and Zechariah, as 
it would appear, was slain " between that temple tmd that 
altar." AVe read in the Targum^ or the Chaldee para- 
phrase of Jonathan Ben- Uziel (said to have been a con- 
temporary of Jesus Christ),^ the following passage, which 
attest to us what was even then, previous to the days of 
our Saviour, the tradition of the Jews with regard to 
this prophet, called indifferently the son of Hiddo and 
the son of Barachias (Zech. i. 1 ; Ezra v. 1 ; vi. 14) : 
The paraphrast (Lam. ii. 20) introduces the " House of 

J xxvi. 5. 

" Hieron. in Isaiam, viii. 2 (in the LXX. Zccxot^Ixv vlev Bctfeixico.) 

8 Prolegom. de Walton, 12. 



240 ZACHARTAS MENTIONED BY JOSKPHUS. 

Judgment" replying to this complaint of Jeremiah : 
*' Shall the priest and the prophet be slain in the sanc- 
tuary of the Lord?" " Was it well in you .... to 
slay a prophet as you did Zechariah, the son of Hiddo, 
in the house of the Lord's sanctuary, because he endea- 
voured to withdraw you from your evil ways ?"^ Thus 
it will be seen that Jesus Christ might remind the Jews 
of the sacrilegious murder of that prophet, son of Bara- 
chias, and son of Hiddo, with whom the prophecy of 
the Old Testament was to close. 

However, there is still a third Zacharias, son of Ba- 
rachias, (or of Baruch, Ba^ov^ov)^ to whom our Lord's 
saying might be applied with still more likelihood. 
Flavius Josephus has made him known to us in that 
inestimable " History of the Jewish War," which con- 
firms so many other prophecies of the New Testament. 
It was only three years before the final destruction of 
Jerusalem, that people saw a Zacharias, son of Barach 
slain by the Jewish zealots in the middle of the holy 
place (h /xs<r(^ roJ /sfw),^ and his body was thro"vvn over 
the walls of the mount on which the temple stood. He 
was a just man, according to Josephus ; he was hated 
for his virtues, for his influence, for his hatred of evil, 
and for his zeal for liberty.^ At the close of that fright- 
ful night, which was, says Josephus, " the real com- 
mencement of the destruction of Jerusalem," (and in 
which the zealots butchered the chief of the nation, the 
high priest Ananus, and, soon after, twelve thousand 
youths of the Israelitish nobility), these infuriated men, 
affecting the forms of justice, had him dragged before a 
court of seventy judges, all of whom, however, had the 
courage to declare him innocent. Then, maddened with 
rage at hearing his reproaches, and at the noble spirit in 
which he addressed them, they rushed upon him and 
massacred him in the niirfdle of the holij place" Here, 
as many commentators think, we behold the last of the 

' Whitby's Commentary on Matt, xxiii. 35. 
« Bell. Jmliiic. lib iv. c. 19. 



THE BARREN FIG-TREE. 241 

just persons Avhose blood has to be required of that 
homicidal race. Abel is the first, Zacharias the last. 
Thus it is, that Jesus Christ, assuming the style of the 
prophets in using the past for the future, speaks of 
this crime as already committed : " W/iom ye sleic" he 
says to them, " hetween the temple and the altar !" 

The historian Josephus, it is true, speaks of Zacharias 
only as a righteous man, and not as a Christian or as a 
prophet. But, being a Jew, he could not hold any other 
language. And we see at another place ( Antiq., lib. xx. 
c. 8), that as little does he speak of the apostle James 
(who, nevertheless, was also a prophet) as more than a 
good man, whom the high priest Ananus caused to be 
stoned,^ to the great regret of the more respectable 
classes, during the interregnum that followed the un- 
expected death of the governor Festus. No more 
does it appear to us that the difference in the termina- 
tions of the n^ime^ Barachias and Baruch^ is enough to 
destroy the argument arising from their etymological 
and radical resemblance. We see, in fact, in the New 
Testament, how much people were accustomed, among 
the Jews, Hebrew or Hellenist, to change the termina- 
tion of their proper names. (Silas and Silvanus,^ Prisca 
and Priscilla,' Rabba and Rabbath, Lucas and Lu- 
cius*). 

Be this as it may, we conclude once more, that this 
passage could not refer to the son of Jehoiadah ; and 
we leave to the reader to decide which of the two 
personages whom we have pointed out was the one 
contemplated by Jesus Christ. 

Second example. — Mark xi. 12-14. — Jesus cursed, a 
Jig-tree ichich had only leaves; for the time for Jigs was 
not yet come. 

Here, we are told, there is no doubt a mistake : why 



8 2 Cor. i. 19; Thess. i. 1; Acts xv. 22,34, xvi. 25, xvii. IS. 
* 2 Tim. IV. 19; Rom. xvi. 3; Acts xviii. 2, 26. 
« Acts xii;. 1 ; Rom. xvi. 21 ; Philem. 24. 



242 CHRONOLOGICAL OBJECTIONS. 

look for fruit at a time when it* could not reasonably be 
expected ? 

Yet there is nothing here but what is very simple. 
Had it been the season for gathering figs, the tree might 
have been stripped of all its fruit by the hand of man ; 
and, in that case, there was no evidence of its barren- 
ness. 

But is a tree (we mention the objection in passing) 
guilty because it bears no fruit ? Why punish it ? We 
reply, that in this miracle, which is a type, the tree is 
as little a sufferer as it is a criminal, nor is its suffering 
more real than its morality. The one is symbolical, 
and so also is the other. 

Another source of precipitate judgment. — In 
questions of chronology, regard has not been paid to 
the following rule (which we take pleasure in express- 
ing here in the very words of the great reformer of 
Italy, the excellent Peter Martyr).^ 

[]The great divisions of time in the history of the 
people of God are pointed out to us by numerical dates 
of great precision. From the passing of Abraham into 
Canaan to the entrance of his grandson into Eg^^t, 
215 years; from that to the passage of the Red Sea, 
215 years more — hence in all 430 years (Gal. iii. 17; 
Exod. xii. 40) ; from that, further, to the foundation 
of the temple, 480 years (1 Kinus vi. 1); and from that, 
in fine, to the Babylonish captivity, 422 yrnrs more. 
But within these grand divisions of history, the precise 
and co-ordinate arrangement of all the short interme- 
diate dates, the reconciling of the numbers presented to 
us by hooks of an almost monumental conciseni'ss, and 
of an jige contemporary with the siege of Troy (that of 
Judges, Kings, and Chronicles), respecting (he reigns 
and interregnums, first of the Judges, then of the Kings, 
especially after the subdivision ot the twelve tribes into 
two distinct kingdoms; this arrangement, we say, pre- 

» In his Commentary on 2 Kings viii. 17, and I Kings xv. 1. 



RULE LAID DOWN BY PETER MARTYR. 243 

sents numerous difficulties, for wliicli we find the ele- 
ments of an entire solution sometimes wanting.]] 
The following is the rule of Peter Martyr : — 
" Although obscure passages occur as to chronology, 
we must beware of pretending to reconcile them by im- 
puting blunders to the inspired books. Therefore it is, 
that, should it sometimes happen that we know not 
how to account for the number of years, we ought 
simply to confess our ignorance, and consider that the 
Scriptures express themselves with so much conciseness 
that it is not always possible for us to discover at what 
epoch we ought to make such or such a computation 
commence. It often enough happens, that, in the his- 
tory of the kings of Judah and of Israel, the respective 
numbers of their years are not easily reconciled ; but 
these difficulties admit of explanation or adjustment in 
several ways. 1. The same year commenced by one of 
two, and finished by the other, is attributed to both. 
2. Often the sons have reigned with their fathers during 
some years, which have been imputed sometimes to the 
fathers, sometimes to the sons. 3. There were often 
interregnums, which the Scripture attributes sometimes 
to the predecessor, sometimes to the successor. Finally, 
it sometimes happens that certain years, in which op- 
pressive and profane princes have reigned, are not 
reckoned to them, being imputed to their immediate 
successor ; thus, the twenty last years of Joram to his 
son Ahaziah. — (2 Kings viii. 26; 2 Chron. xxii. 2.)" 

We think that the examples we have thus far ad- 
duced, may suffice. We refrain from adducing more. 
What we have said may give one an idea of the weight 
to be attached to these difficulties,-"^ for (we repeat) we 
have been careful to adduce those which have been 
held as the most serious. Warned by these examples, 
and by so many others, let us learn then, should any 

1 See, for further details, the authors whom we have quoted, and 
in particular the useful compilation of Home. — (Introduction to the 
Critical Study of the Bible). 



244 NATURAL PHILOSOPHY OBJECTIONS. 

embarrassment of the same kind occur to us i:i fu- 
ture, how to judge as did Origan's friend, Julius Afri- 
canus, sixteen hundred years ago. and as, before 
and after him, all the men of God have done. " Be 
that as it may (said he on the occasion of the two 
genealogies of Jesus Christ, which he had reconciled) 
be that as it may, the gospel certainly every where 
speaks true !" — To /Avroi EvayyeXiov 'rdvrojg a'ATthCsi.^ 



SECTION VI. 

ERRORS CONTRARY TO NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. 

It will be admitted, we have been sometimes told, 
that the apparent or real contradictions in the dates, 
quotations, and narratives of the Holy Bible, may pos- 
sibly be removed by the resources of a more or less 
laborious exegesis ; but there are others which you can- 
not reconcile : such are all those expressions in which 
the sacred writers appear in manifest opposition to the 
now better known laws of nature. Nevertheless (these 
objectors desire to add), though this argument be irre- 
fragable against the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures, 
it compromises in nothing the divinity of their doc- 
trines, any more than the great religious facts which 
they report to us. In inspiring his apostles and his 
prophets, God desired to make us, not scientific, but 
holy persons. Thus he could, without danger, allow 
the writers he employed to speak in ignorance of the 
phenomena of the material world ; and their prejudices 
on such matters are innocent though incontestablt* 
Do you not often find them expressing themselves as if 
the earth were immovable and the sun in motion ? 
That star, according to them, rises and falls : " his going 
forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto 
the ends of it" (Ps. xix); the moon and the stars arc 

> Euseb. Hist. Eccles., lib. i. c. 7. 



THE SUN THAT STOOD STILL ON GIBF.OX. 245 

equally in movemeut ; the sun, at the connuaud of 
Joshua became immovable, in the midst of the heavens, 
it '' stood still upon Gibeon, and the moon in the valley 
of Ajalon" (Josh. x. 12) ; the earth is " founded on the 
seas" (Ps. xxiv. 2); '"drawn from the water, it sub- 
sists amid the water" (2 Peter iii, 5); " God hath laid 
its foundations, it shall never be moved" (Ps. civ. 5) — 
Can you admit that this is really the language of the 
Creator of the heavens and of the earth, when address- 
ing his creatures ? 

We proceed to reply to this objection, and we are de- 
lighted to meet it on our path, seeing that the examination 
of it can only redound ro the glory of the Scriptures. 

"We most fully admit that were there some physical 
errors, duly ascertained, in the book of the Scriptures, 
it would not be entirely from God ; but wo proceed to 
put it beyond a doubt that there are no such errors ; 
and we will venture to dety our adversaries to produce 
a single such error in the whole of the Bible. Nay, 
we will even go much farther ; and will show how much 
latent science, on the contrary, betrays itself there, be- 
neath the simplicity of its language. 

We shall begin by saving a few words on Joshua's 
miracle, inasmuch as a disposition has often been shown 
to turn it to account in combating either the plenary 
inspiration, or even the divine mission of the men of 
God. Several unbelieving writers have attacked it with 
that arrogance and irony which too often characterize 
them. But it is easy to reply to them. We have no 
thoughts of discussing here the methods by which the 
miracle might have been accomplished ; we would only 
remark, from this example, how lightly people hasten 
to pronounce, that because certain passages of Scripture 
are not understood, therefore they must needs be irra- 
tional. 

The sun, on the day of the battle of Beth-horon, 
stood still in the midst of heaven, we are told in the 
10th chaper of Joshua; and there icas no day like that 
before it or after it. 



246 STOPPAGE BY CONTINUOUS ACTION. 

It has been said in Germany — " This phrase, taken in 
its natural sense, seems to us absurd ; it is erroneous, 
therefore, and altogether human." Elsewhere it has 
been pronounced so absurd, that another meaning 
must be given to it. But both opinions are drawn from 
false premises. The fact is far from being absurd ; it 
is only miraculous. 

"We shall give the objection in the very words in 
which it has been stated : — " The most fearless metho- 
dist," it has been said, " will feel constrained to own 
that in the system of our globe, were the sun to stop 
for an instant, or were the earth's motion to be slackened, 
belligerent armies, and all that is on the earth's surface, 
would be swept away like chaflf before the Avind !" 

Nevertheless, it is this very objection which is an 
error. In point of fact, if the miracle, instead of stop- 
ping the rotation of the globe suddenly, in an indivisi- 
ble instant, took only the short space of a few seconds 
to accomplish it, by a supple and continuous action, 
then you have enough in this feeble circumstance to be 
assured that such a phenomenon would have had no 
very sensible effect mechanically beyond that of raising 
the waters diffused over the surface of the earth, and 
making them to flow from west to east. A child might 
tell it you. Let a carriage in rapid motion meet a curb- 
stone — it shatters itself upon it, because the stone is im- 
movable ; and all that are in the carriage are projected 
to a distance, and thrown with violence on the ground. 
But let it be stopt by a continuous resistance, operating 
in a successive manner, and consummating itself in 
three or four seconds : then the smallest cliildren seated 
in the carriage will remain in their seats ; they will not 
even feel the impulsion which three seconds before was 
impressed on them by the impetuous movement of the 
horses, and which, without this precaution, would have 
sufficed to launch them to a distance. 

The rotation of the earth is, at (he equator, 142G feet 
the second ; at Jerusalem, 1212 feet. This is the ini- 
tial speed of a canon ball projected by a charge the fifth 



PROJECTILE IMPULSION ILLUSTRATED. 247 

part of its own weight. It is capable (abstraction being 
made of the resistance of the air) of raising that pro- 
jectile to the extreme height of 24,000 feet ; and yet a 
child, six years old, would destroy, without danger, hi 
two-thirds of a minute^ the whole of this force by the 
continued action of his fingers. Put into his little 
hands a canon ball of eight pounds weight, and let him 
hold it against the action of its weight during two-thirds 
of a minute; during the same time, allow another bul- 
let of quite the same weight to drop freely through the 
air, and from the height of the summit of the Himalaya 
range. When forty seconds only have expired, the 
force of gravitation, after having acted b^/ ike same im,- 
pulsions upon both these projectiles, will not have done 
more with respect to the first than have fatigued the feeble 
hands that resist it, while it would have made the 
other acquire a speed equal to that which the rotation 
of the earth impressed on the belligerent armies on the 
hill of Beth-horon. Since, then, a child might destroy, 
by the continuous effort of his little hands, a force ca- 
pable (if concentrated on a single instant) of launching 
a canon bullet to the height of Chimborazo, we can 
easily conceive that, if God, on the day of the battle of 
Beth-horon, had employed two-thirds of a minute to 
arrest, by short and successive resistances, the rotation 
of our globe, then the projectile impulsions which a 
mass of eight pounds of iron would have received con- 
tinually during these forty seconds, would not even have 
been so strong as that a child might not have destroyed 
them by the sole effort of his fingers, and without ex- 
pending more force than he would have to put forth in 
sustaining with his hands a weight of eight pounds 
during the same space of time. And if the mass, in- 
stead of having the form of a bullet, had had that of a 
quoit or a cube, it would not have had enough of that 
impulsion to make it overcome the resistance of friction, 
and to change its place on the surface of the ground. 

It will be objected, perhaps, that the rotation of the 
earth at Beth-horon, was twenty-seven times more rapid 
23 



248 ANOTHER OBJECTION EQUALLY FUTILE. 

than that of a steam-carriage on a railway. This is 
true; but since the retarding force necessary for ex- 
hausting a given impulsion is in the inverse ratio of 
the time employed in it, grant that the miracle took 
eighteen minutes for its consummation ; take eighteen 
minutes (instead of forty seconds) for the entire stop- 
page of the movement of the terrestrial globe at the 
voice of Joshua ; and then the belligerent armies, in- 
stead of being " swept away as if by a tempest," would 
not have felt more from what happened, than do the 
thousands of travellers that are stopt at each of the 
stations on a railway. 

Other difficulties of a like kind have been started 
with regard to this miracle of Joshua. Had the earth, 
it has been said, suspended its motion during ten hours, 
the attractive force of the sun acting singly upon it, would 
in that time have made it fall 900 leagues in the direc- 
tion of the sun's blazing focus, and the annual conditions 
of our orbit would have been sensibly troubled. 

This objection is no less futile than the preceding. 
The miracle, in fact, does not imply the slightest per- 
turbation in the progressive movement of the earth ; it 
requires it only in its rotation. Now, according to the 
laws of the celestial mechanism, the rotation of a star 
upon its axis is entirely independent of the movement 
impressed on its centre of gravity, and which makes it 
move onwards in its elliptical course. Experience had at- 
tested this before it was demonstrated by calculation. 
It had long been observed that the speed of the sun (or 
rather of the earth) in its orbit, ceases not to vary from 
one end of the year to the other ; and yet there does 
not exist in nature a more uniform movement than that 
which makes the whole celestial sphere daily revolve to 
our eyes. We are even assured, from the observations 
of the movement of the moon, that for more than 2000 
years the sidereal day has not varied so much as the 
hundredth part of a second. 

Let there be supposed, then, a double shock impressed 
upon the earth above and below its centre, and in two 



FUTILITY OP THE OBJECTIONS. 249 

contrary and parallel directions, and we shall have ex- 
plained how its rotation on its axis might have been 
suspended without any change in its onward movement. 
But here I check myself. It would be rash, do I say ? 
it would be childish to pretend to enter into the details 
of the prodigy with the view of ascertaining its causes ; 
and my only wish has been to show the futility of the 
objections. The true one, which people do not state, 
is that they find the miracle too great for its object. 
But, for men who believe in the great miracle of re- 
demption by the Son of God, nothing is too great, and all 
things advance in due proportions, in the divine revela- 
tions. Moreover, and I hasten to say it, it would not 
even be necessary, in order to account for this prodigy, 
to suppose so sovereign an act of Omnipotence as the 
suspension of the rotation of our globe. God might 
have employed for this purpose only one of those nu- 
merous means which divert the light from its paths, 
and produce the innumerable illusions of optics ; some 
one of those refractions, for example, which daily dis- 
place to our eyes, in different measm-es, all the stars of 
the celestial sphere. Is it not matter of notoriety, that 
in the polar regions the power of the horizontal refrac- 
tions makes the sun appear to the inhabitants of those 
cold countries ten days before he really rises above the 
horizon ? Such might have been the cause of the mi- 
racle of Beth-horon. We decide nothing; we do not 
even venture on a hypothesis. We would only say, 
that the miracle was duly consummated (whatever the 
means by which it was produced), provided that the 
sun, to the eyes of the inhabitants of Palestine, stood 
still upon Gibeon^ and the moon in the valley of Ajalon} 
Meanwhile, the Scriptures are reproached with hold- 
ing a language on the daily phenomena of nature, ap- 
parently betokening ignorance, and incompatible with 
a plenary inspiration. According to the writers of the 
Bible, the sun rises, the sun sets, the sun stands still, 

> One may read, besides, on this miracle, some striking historical 
and geological considerations in Chaubard's EL<.menis de (Jedogie. 



250 POPULAR LANGUAGE OF SCRIPTURE 

the earth remains unmoved. People will have it that the 
Creator, in speaking to us in a book inspired by him, 
would have more clearly shown us that the Spirit, that 
made the sacred historians speak, knew before we did 
the rotation of our globe, its periodical revolution, and 
the respective immobility of the sun. 

Let us, then, examine this reproach. 

We ask, first of all, of the persons who give utterance 
to it, if they would have had the Bible to speak like 
Sir Isaac Newton. Would they dismiss from their 
minds the consideration that if God, in speaking of the 
decrees of nature, were to express himself, I do not say 
only as he sees them, but as the scienti6c men of future 
ages will be able to see them, then even the great New- 
ton could have understood nothing of what was said ? 
Moreover, even the most advanced languai^e of science 
is not yet, and never will be, after all, more than the 
language of appearances. The visible world, much 
more than you suppose, is a passing shadow, a scene of 
illusions and of phantoms. What you call a reality is 
still in itself but a phenomenon considered in its rela- 
tion to a more exalted reality, and to an ulterior ana- 
lysis. In our mortal lips the word reality has no- 
thing absolute ; it is a term altogether relative, merely 
intimating that people think they have added one new 
step to the deep ladder of our ignorances. The human 
eye sees objects under only two dimensions, and pro- 
jects them all as if on the same canvass, until touch and 
repeated experience have assured us of the reality of a 
depth, or of a third dimension. Colours are accidents, 
and it is only by reflection or illusion that they belong 
to the object which presents them to you. Even the 
impenetrability of bodies, their solidity, their extension, 
are no more than an appearance, and present themselves 
as a reality only until the farther progress of one science 
shall substitute another for it. Who would venture to 
say where this analysis ought to stop, and in what 
terms should we speak of creatures with which we are 
most familiar, were we but endowed with one more sense. 



THE ONLY INTELLIGIBLE LANGUAGE. 251 

with antennae, for example, like ants and bees? The 
expression of* appearances, accordingly, provided it be 
exact, is, among men, philosophically correct, and what 
it behoved the Scriptures to employ. Would men have 
the Bible speak to us of the scenes of nature otherwise 
than we speak of them to one another, in our social or 
domestic intercourse, otherwise even than they are 
spoken of among the most enlightened persons ? When 
Sir John Herschel tells his domestics to Avaken him 
precisely at midnight, to observe the passage of some 
star over his meridian telescope, does he feel himself 
called upon to speak to them about the rotation of the 
earth, and of the moment when it will have brought 
their nadir into the plane of its orbit ? I should think 
not ; and were you even to hear him converse in Green- 
wich Observatory with the scientific Airey, you would 
find, that even in that sanctuary of science, the habitual 
language of these astronomers is still quite like that of 
the Scriptures. For them the stars rise, the equinoxes 
recede, the planets go forward and accelerate their 
speed, stop and go back. Would you, then, that Moses 
should speak to all the generations of men in a more 
scientific language than La Place or Arago ? 

But more than this. Here we would bid the reader 
notice two general facts, that throw out a deal of light 
the moment we study them, and which soon betray in 
the Scriptures the pen of Almighty God. Here, as every 
where else, the objections, when narrowly examined, 
come back upon you, loudly retract themselves, and 
become arguments on the other side. 

These two focts are analogous to what you might 
observe in the words of a scientific astronomer convers- 
ing with his sons in their boyhood, and pointing out 
the earth and the heavens to them with his finger. If 
you follow him into these conversations, where his af- 
fection, stooping to their level, presents to their growing 
intelligence such images and words as it can compre- 
hend, you will soon notice his respect for truth shown 
under a double character. First, he will never say any 



252 ILLUSTRATION FROM DOMESTIC LIFE. 

thing to them that is not true ; and, secondly, there 
will be many intimations in his words that he knows 
more on the subject than he wishes to tell them. He 
will make no pretension, it is true, to teach them science; 
but, on the one hand, nothing in all he says will con- 
tradict its principles ; and, on the other hand, several 
of his words will at once reveal that while he restrains 
himself from speaking about it, still he knows it. After- 
wards, when his children, grown up to m.anhood, come 
to recall his words, not only will they find them exempt 
from all error, but they will farther recognize in them 
such a skilful choice of expression as to put them at 
on-ce in a pre established harmony with science, and to 
present it to them, Avhile not aware of it, in its germ. 
In proportion to the gradual advance of their own know- 
ledge, they will see with admiration, under the reserve 
and simplicity of his language, concealed marks of 
wisdom, instances of a scientific precision, a general 
phraseology and particular expressions harmonizing 
with events then unknown to them, but that had long 
been known to him. 

Well, then, such also is the double observation which 
every attentive reader may make on the phraseology of 
the Scriptures. They speak poetically, but with preci- 
sion, the true language of appearances. In them we 
hear a father condescending to address his youngest 
sons, yet in such a manner that the oldest can never 
find there a single sentence contrary to the true condi- 
tion of the things he has created ; and in such a manner 
also he suffers to escape from him, without affectation, 
enough to demonstrate to them that all that they have 
learned of his works during the last four thousand years, 
he knew before them and better than they. It is thus 
that, in the Bible, Eternal Wisdom addresses his children. 
In proportion as they advance in growth, they see that 
the Scripture is made for their age, is adapted to their 
develo})nient, appearing to grow with their growth, and 
always presenting the two facts which we have pointed 
out ; on the one hand, the absence of all error ; on the 



NO PHYSICAL ERROR IN THE BIBLE. 253 

other, indirect yet incontestable indications of a science 
which preceded all that of man. 

First fact. — There is no physical error in the Word 
of God. 

If there were any, we have admitted it, the book 
would not be from God. " God is not man that he 
should lie," nor the son of man that he should be mis- 
taken. He behoves, no doubt, in order to his being 
understood, to stoop to our weakness, but without in 
the least partaking in it ; and his language will always 
be found to witness to his condescension, never to his 
ignorance. 

This remark is still more serious than one would sup- 
pose before having reflected on it. It becomes very 
striking on a close examination. 

Examine all the false theologies of the ancients and 
moderns ; read in Homer or in Hesiod, the religious codes 
of the Greeks ; study those of the Buddhists, those of 
the Brahmins, those of the Mahommedans : you will not 
only find in these repulsive systems on the subject of 
the Godhead, but will meet with the grossest errors on 
the material world. You will be revolted with their 
theology no doubt ; but their natural philosophy and 
their astronomy also, ever allied to their religion, wiU 
be found to rest on the most absurd notions. 

Read in the Chou-king and the Y-king of the 
Chinese, their fantastic systems on the five elements 
(wood, fire, earth, metal, and water), and on their om- 
nipotent influences on all divine and human affairs.^ 
Read in the iShaster, in the Pouran^ in the four books 
of the Vedham^ or law of the Hindus, their revolting 
cosmogony. The moon is 50,000 leagues higher than 
the sun ; it shines with its own light ; it animates our 
body. Night is caused by the sun's setting behind the 
mountain Someyra, situated in the middle of the earth, 
and several thousand miles high. Our earth is flat and 

» Panthier, Lea livres sacres de I'Orient (Paris, 1840), pp. 15, 89, 
94, U6, &c. 



254 MONSTROUS ERRORS OF PAGANISM. 

triangular, composed df seven stages, each with its own 
degree of beauty, its own inhabitants, and its own sea, 
the first of honey, another of sugar, another of butter, 
another of wine ; in fine, the whole mass is borne on 
the heads of countless elephants which, in shaking 
themselves, cause earthquakes in this nether world ! ^ 
In one word, they have placed the whole history of 
their gods in relations at once the most fantastic and 
the most necessary with the physical world and all the 
phenomena of the universe. Thus, the missionaries of 
India have often repeated that a telescope, silently 
planted in the midst of the holy city of Benares, or in 
the ancient Ava, would prove a battery, powerful as 
lightning, for overturning the whole system of Brahma, 
and the whole of that of Boudhou. 

Read farther the philosophers of Greek and Roman 
antiquity, Aristotle, Seneca, Pliny, Plutarch, Cicero. 
How many expressions of opinion will you not find there, 
any single one of which would be enough to compro- 
mise all our doctrines of inspiration, if it could be met 
with in any book of Holy Scripture ! Read Mahomet's 
Koran, making mountains to be created " to prevent 
the earth from moving, and to hold it fast as if with 
anchors and cables." What do I say ? Read even the 
cosmogony of Buffon, or some of Voltaire's sneers on 
the doctrine of a deluge, or on the fossil animals of a 
primitive world. We will go much farther. Read 
again, we do not say the absurd reasonings of the pagans, 
of Lucretius, of Pliny, or of Plutarch, against the theory 
of the antipodes, but even the fathers of the Christian 
Church. Hear the theological indignation of the ad- 
mirable Augustine, who says that it is opposed to 
the Scriptures ; and the scientific eloquence of Lactan- 
tius, who considers it so opposed to common sense : 
''^ Num (il'iqind loquuntur I " he exclaims; "is there 
any man so silly as to believe that men exist having 
their foot above their heads, trees with their fruit hang 

» Modern Lni. Hist. vol. vi. p. 275. 



ERRORS OF r>-I>-SPIRED CHRIsTlA-NS. 255 

ing downwards, rain, snow, and hail falling topsy 
turry !" ''They would answer you," he adds, "by main- 
taining that the earth is ^ globe ! QuiJ dicam de its 
ne^cio, qui cum semel aberrarerint, constanUr in stultitia 
persererant^ et rajiis rana dtfendiint !" '• One knows not 
what to say of such men, who, when they have once 
run into error, persist in their folly, and defend one 
absurdity by another I " ^ 

Listen, farther, to the legate Boniface, who brought 
Virgilius. for his opinion in this matter, as a heretic be- 
fore the Pope; listen to Pope Zachary treating that 
unhappy bishop as homo malignus. '■' If it be proved," 
says he, " that Virgilius maintains the existence of 
other men under this earth, call a council, condemn 
him, put him out of the Church, depose him from the 
priesthood ! " Listen, at a later period, to the whole 
clergy of Spain, and especially to the imposing Council 
of Salamanca, indignant at the geographical system by 
which Christopher Columbus was led to look for a 
whole new continent. Listen, at the epoch of Xewron's 
birth, to the great Galileo, who '' ascended," says Kepler. 
" the highest ramparts of the universe," and who justi- 
fied at once by his genius and by his telescope the dis- 
owned and condemned system of Copernicus ; behold 
him groaning, at the age of eighty, in the prisons of 
Rome, for having discovered the movement of the earth, 
after having had to pronounce these words, ten years 
before (28th June 1633), before their Eminences, at 
the palace of the Holy Office : '' I, Galileo, in the seven- 
tieth year of my age. on my knees before your Emi- 
nences, having before my eyes, and touching with my 
own hands, the Holy Scriptures, abjure, curse, and 
detest, the error of the earth's movement." 

"VThat might we not have been entitled to say of the 
Scriptures, had they expressed themselves on the phe- 
nomena of nature, as these have been spoken of by all 
the ancient sages ? — had they referred all to four ele- 

1 On False Knowledge, book iiL chap. '2-L 



256 ERRORS OP THE ANCIENT SAGES. 

merits, as people did for so long a period ? — had thej 
yaid the stars were of crystal, as did Philolaus of Cro- 
tona; and had they, like Empedocles, lighted up the two 
hemispheres of our world with two suns ? — had they 
taught, like Leucippus, that the fixed stars, set ablaze 
by the swiftness of their diurnal morement round the 
earth, feed the sun with their fires? — had they, like 
Diodorus of Sicily, and all the Egyptian sages, formed 
the heavens and the earth by the motion of the air and 
the natural ascent of fire ? — or had they thought, like 
Philolaus, that the sun has only a borrowed light, and 
is only a mirror, which receives and sends down to us 
the light of the celestial spheres ? — had they, like Anaxa- 
goras, conceived it to be a mass of iron larger than the 
Peloponnesus, and the earth to be a mountain, whose 
roots stretched infinitely downwards ? — had they ima- 
gined the heaven to be a solid sphere, to which the 
fixed stars are attached, as was done by Aristotle, and 
almost all the ancients ? — had they called the celestial 
vault dijirmamentum^ or a crg^sco^aa, as their interpreters 
have done, both in Latin and in Greek? — had they 
spoken, as has been done so recently, and even among 
people professing Christianity, of the influence exerted 
by the movements of the heavens on the elements of 
this lower world, on the characters of men, and on the 
course of human afi^airs ? Such is the natural proneness 
of all nations to this superstition, that, notwithstanding 
their religion, the ancient Jews, and the Christians 
themselves, equally fell into it. " The modern Greeks," 
says D'Alembert,^ " have carried it to excess ; hardly do 
we find one of their authors who does not, on all occa- 
sions, speak of predictions by the stars, of hc^roscopes, 
and talismans, so that there was hardly an edifice in 
Constantinople, and in all Greece, that had not been 
erected according to the rules of the apotele^^matic astro- 
logy." French historians observe, that astrology was so 
much in fashion under Catherine de Medicis, that 

Encycl. ou Diet. rai«. des Sciencee, &c., t. i. p. b'63. (Lucca, 17^^^^) 



NO ASTROLOGY IN THE SCRIPTURES. 257 

people dared not undertake any thing of importance 
without having consulted the stars ; and even under 
Henry III. and Henry IV., the predictions of astrologers 
formed the engrossing subject of ordinary conversation 
at court. " We have seen, towards the close of the last 
century," says Ph. Giulani,^ "an Italian send Pope In- 
nocent XI. a prediction, in the manner of a horoscope, 
on Vienna, at that time besieged by the Turks, and 
which was very well received." And in our own days 
the Count de Boulainvilliers has written very seriously 
on the subject. 

Open now the Bible ; study its fifty sacred authors, 
from that wonderful Moses who held the pen in the wil- 
derness, four hundred years before the war of Troy, 
down to the fisherman, son of Zebedee, who wrote fif- 
teen hundred years afterwards, in Ephesus and in Pat- 
mos, under the reign of Domitian ; open the Bible, and 
try if you can to find any thing of this sort there. No. 
None of those blunders which the science of every suc- 
cessive age discovers in the books of those that preceded 
it; none of those absurdities, above all, which modem 
astronomy points out, in such numbers, in the writings 
of the ancients, in their sacred codes, in their systems 
of philosophy, and in the finest pages even of the fathers 
of the Church ; no such errors can be found in any of 
our sacred books ; nothing there will ever contradict 
what, after so many ages, the investigations of the learn- 
ed world have been able to reveal to us of what is cer- 
tain in regard to the state of our globe or of that of the 
heavens. Carefully peruse our Scriptures from one end 
to the other, in search of such blemishes there ; and while 
engaged in this research, remember that it is a book 
which speaks of every thing, which describes nature, 
which proclaims its grandeur, which tells the story of 
its creation, which informs us of the structure of the 
heavens, of the creation of light, of the waters, of the 
atmosphere, of the mountains, of animals, and of plants; 

i Encycl. ou Diet. rais. dea Sciences, &c., t. i. p. 664. 



258 THE SCRIPTURES VARIOUS, TET TRUE. 

— it is a book that tells us of the first revolutions of the 
world, and foretells to us also the last ; a book that re- 
lates them in circumstantial narratives, exalts them in a 
sublime poesy, and chants them in strains of fervent 
psalmody ; — it is a book replete with the glow of orien- 
tal rapture, elevation, variety, and boldness; — it is a 
book which speaks of the earth and of things visible, at 
the same time that it speaks of the celestial world and 
of things invisible ; — it is a book to which nearly fifty 
writers of every degree of mental cultivation, of every 
rank, of every condition, and separated by fifteen hun- 
dred years from each other, have successively put their 
hand ; — it is a book composed first in the centre of Asia, 
among the sands of Arabia, or in the deserts of Judea, 
or in the fore-court of the temple of the Jews, or in the 
rustic schools of the prophets of Bethel and of Jericho, 
or in the sumptuous palaces of Babylon, or on the ido- 
latrous banks of Chebar ; and afterwards, at the centre 
of western civilisation, amid the Jews with their mani- 
fold ignorance, amid polytheism and its ideas, as well as 
in the bosom of pantheism and its silly philosophy ; — it 
is a book the first writer of which had been for the space 
of forty years a pupil of the magicians of Egypt, who 
looked upon the sun, and the stars, and the elements as 
endowed with intelligence, as re- acting upon the ele- 
ments, and as governing the world by continual effluxes; 
— it is a book the first chapters of which preceded by 
more than nine hundred years the most ancient phi- 
losphers of ancient Greece and of Asia, the Thaleses, 
the Pythagorases, the Zaleucuses, the Xenophaneses, the 
Confuciuses ; — it is a book which carries its narratives 
even into the field of the invisible world, even into the 
hierarchies of the angels, even into the remotest realms 
of futurity, and the glorious scenes of the last day ; — 
well then, search through these 50 authors, search 
through these 66 books, search through these 1189 
chapters, and these 31,173 verses. . . . starch for one 
single error of those thousands with whicli ancient and 
modem books abound, when they speak eitlior of the 



THE SCRIPTURES POETICAL, YET TRUE. 259 

heaven or of the earth, or of their revolutions, or of their 
elements ; search, but you will search in vain. 

There is nothing constrained or reserved in its lan- 
guage ; it speaks of all things and in all tones ; it is the 
prototype, it is the unapproachable model ; it has been 
the inspirer of all the most exalted productions of poetry. 
Ask this of Milton, of the two Racines, of Young, of 
Klopstock. They will tell you that this divine poesy is 
of all the most lyrical, the boldest in its flights, and the 
most sublime : it rises on a cherub and soars on the 
wings of the wind. And yet never does this book do 
violence to the facts or to the principles of a sound phi- 
losophy of nature. Never will you find it in opposition, 
in the case of a single sentence, with the correct notions 
which science has enabled us to reach with regard to 
the form of our globe, its size, or its geology ; on the 
vacuum and on space ; on the inert and obedient mate- 
riality of all the stars ; on the planets, on their masses, 
on their courses, bn their dimensions, or on their influ- 
ences ; on the suns that people the depths of space, on 
their number, on their nature, or their immensity. Just 
as in speaking of the invisible world, and of a subject 
so new, so unknown, and so delicate, as that of the an- 
gels, this book has not one of its, authors that, in the 
course of the 1560 years which it took to write it, has 
varied in the character of charity, humility, fervour, and 
purity which belongs to those mysterious beings ; just as 
in speaking of the relations of the celestial world with 
God, never has one of these fifty writers, either in the 
Old or in the New Testament, uttered a single word 
that favours that constant leaning to pantheism which 
characterises the whole philosophy of the Gentiles ; so 
likewise you will not find one of the authors of the 
Bible who, in speaking of the visible world, has suf- 
ferred a single one of those expressions of opinion to 
escape him, which, in other books, contradict the reality 
of facts — not one which makes the heaven to be a fir- 
mament, as has been done by the Septuagint, St Jerome, 
and aW the Fathers of the Church — not one that makes 
24 



260 NO PHYSICAL ERROR IN THE SCRIPTURES. 

the world, as Plato did, an intelligent animal — not one 
that reduces all things here below to the four elements 
of the physical system of the ancients — not one that 
holds with the Jews, with the Latins, with the Greeks, 
with the finest minds of antiquity, with the great Tacitus 
among the ancients, with the great De Thou among the 
moderns, with the sceptic Michael Montaigne, that " the 
stars have domination and power, not only over our 
lives and the conditions of our fortune, but even over 
our inclinations, our discourses, our wills ; that they 
govern, impel, and agitate them at the mercy of their 
influences ; and that (according as our reason teaches 
us and finds it to be) the whole world feels the impul- 
sion of the slightest celestial movements. Facta etenim 
et vitas hominwn suspendit ah astris ;"'^ — not one that 
speaks of the mountains as Mahomet has done, of the 
cosmogony like Bufifon, of the antipodes like Lucretius, 
like Plutarch, like Pliny, like Lactantius, like St Au- 
gustine, like Pope Zachary. — Assuredly, were there to 
be found in the Bible a single one of those errors that 
abound among philosophers, as well ancient as modem, 
our faith in the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures 
would be more than compromised by it ; we should 
have to acknowledge that there are errors in the Word 
of God, and that these delusive expressions are those of 
a fallible writer, not those of the Holy Ghost ; for God is 
not man that he should lie ; in him there is no variable- 
ness, neither shadow of falsity ; and IJe to whom lying 
lips are an abomination, could not have been capal)le of 
contradicting himself and dictating that which is false. 

There is no physical error, then, in the Scriptures ; 
and this great fact, which becomes all the more striking 
the more narrowly we look into it, is the manifest proof 
of an inspiration carried into their choice of the smallest 
expressions they employ. 

But we have more to say than this, and now come 
to the second fact. 

* Essays, book ii. chap. 12. 



PROFOUND SCIENCE OF THE SCRIPTURES. 261 

Not only lias the Bible not admitted any false state- 
ment of opinion or expression ; but further, it has often 
allowed words to escape which enable us to see, beyond 
all possibility of our being mistaken, the science of the 
Almighty. His grand aim, no doubt, is to reveal to us 
the eternal glories of the invisible world, not the barren 
secrets of that which is doomed to perish. Meanwhile, 
however, it often happens that his language, when we 
listen to it with attention, allows a science to be seen 
which it is not his design to teach, but of which he 
cannot be ignorant, because it is in Mm a great deep. 
Not only will he never teach us any thing false, even 
cursorily ; but, further, you will often stumble on words 
which betray the voice of the Creator of all worlds. 
Often you will remark in these a wisdom, a forethought, 
an exactness, of which the ages of antiquity had no 
idea, and which nothing but the discoveries of the 
telescope, the calculating processes, and the science of 
the modems, have enabled us to appreciate ; so that its 
language wdll be found to bear, by means of these traits, 
the evident characters of the most entire inspiration. 
The discretion and departure from usual practice shown 
in its expressions, the nature of certain details, the 
perfect propriety and divine adaptation of which to the 
facts have remained unrevealed till three thousand 
years afterwards ; the reserve of the language, some- 
times its very hardihood, and its strangeness for the 
time in which it was written : all these signs will enable 
you to recognize the savant par excellence., the Ancient 
of days, who addresses himself to his children no doubt, 
but who speaks as the father of the family, and who 
knows the whole of his house. 

When the Scripture speaks of the form of our earth, 
it makes it a globe. ^ When it speaks of the position 
of this globe in the bosom of the universe, it hangs it 
UPON NOTHING (-^^Va \'j')? When it speaks of its age, 
not only does it place its creation, as well as that of the 

1 Isa. xl. 22; Job. xxvi. 10; Pro v. viii. 27. 

2 Job. xxvi. 7 {x(tfjiM,iuv yyjv irt oiiitvif). 



262 THE HEAVENS AN EXPANSE. 

heavens, in the beginning, that is, before ages which 
it cannot or will not number ; but, further, it takes care 
to place before the disembroilment of chaos and the 
creation of man, that of angels and archangels, princi- 
palities and powers, their probation, the fiiU of some 
and their ruin, the perseverance of others and their 
glory.-*- When it speaks, afterwards, of the origin of 
our continents, and of the last creation of plants, ani- 
mals, and men, it then gives to our new world, and to 
this proud race of ours, so young an age, that men of 
all times, among all earth's peoples, and even in our 
modern schools, have foolishly revolted at it ; still it is 
an age to which they have been compelled to resign 
themselves since the labours of the De Lues, the Cuviers, 
and the Bucklands, have so fully demonstrated that the 
state of the globe's surface, as well as the monuments 
of history and those of science, must compel alike the 
learned and the vulgar to submit to it. When it speaks 
of the heavens, it employs, in alluding to them and de- 
fining them, the most philosophic and the most beautiful 
expression ; an expression which the Greeks in their 
Septuagint, the Latins in the Vulgate, and all the 
Church Fathers in their discourses, have made bold to 
correct, and which they have perverted from its proper 
meaning, because it seemed opposed to the science of 
their times. The heavens, in the Bible, are the ex- 
panse, expansum^ vy^ ;^ that is to say, it is the void, or 
the ether, or the immensity, and not ihejirmamentum of 
St Jerome ; nor the orgoiw/xa of the Alexandrine inter- 
preters; nor the eighth heaven^ firm, solid, crystalline, and 
incorruptible of Aristotle, and all the ancients. And 
although this, which is so remarkable a term of the 
Hebrew, recurs seventeen times in the Old Testament, 
and although seventeen times the seventy have ren- 
dered it by ffr£^saj/ji>a (Jinna)nent), never has the New 
Testament thought fit to make use, in this sense, of 

> Nehem. ix. 6; Col. i. 16; Dan. vii. 10, comparo with .hi-l.' K; 
Gen. iii. 1, 13, 1.5; Apoc. xx. 2, xii. 9, 12; Gen. iii, 24; J lui viii. 14 ; 
2 Pet. ii. 4, 9, 10; John xii. 31. « Gen. i. (i; IV xix li. 



LIGHT CREATED BEFORE THE SUV. 263 

that expression of the Greek interpreters.^ When it 
speaks of light, it represents it to us as an element in- 
dependent of the sun, and as anterior by three epochs 
to that in which that great luminary was kindled;^ thus 
anticipating the systems of the moderns, whom we ha^-e 
seen led, along with the great Newton, to suppose 
in the universe an ether, eminently subtile, powerfully 
elastic, and diifused every where, the contractions and 
dilatations of which would produce, not only the various 
phenomena of light, but those too of gravitation.^ 
When it speaks of the creation of plants, it makes 
them vegetate, grow, and bear seed before the appearance 
of the sun, and under conditions of light, heat, and 
humidity, which were not those under which our vege- 
tables live at the present day;* and it is thus that it 
reveals to us, some thousands of years ago, an order 
of things which the Fossil Botany of these late times 
of ours has declared incontestable, and the neces- 
sary existence of which is attested by the gigantic 
forms of the vegetables lately discovered in Canada, 
and at Bafl&n's Bay ; some, like M. Marcel de Ser- 
ies,^ having recourse, in order to explain it, to a ter- 
restrial magnetism at that time more intense, or to 
more luminous aurorge boreales ; others, like M. de 
Candolle,^ to a great inclination of the ecliptic, al- 
though in reality (according to the famous theorem of 
La Grange) the mechanism of the heavens confines 
within, very narrow limits this variation of the planetary 

* It has made use of it only once, and that in speaking of some- 
thing quite different from the heavens. Col, i, 5. 

a Gen. i. 4, 14. 

3 This hypothesis of etherial pulsations and of a vibrating medium 
expanded every where, was the constant idea of this incomparable 
philosopher, in his most elevated views on the constitution of tb.e 
universe. He even deduced from it the explanation of all the phe- 
nomena of combination, cohesion, elasticity, and of movement, wiiich 
seem to be produced by intani;ible and imponderable principles. — 
(See his LMer to Br Boyle on the Cavi^eof Wtvjht : his M.moir 
addressed to the Royal Society of London in Dec. 1675 : and two 
articles of Baren Meurice in the Bibl. Urii. de Ueneve, 18'-'2. p. 79). 

< Gen. i, 12. * Memoires de Marcel de Serres. 

« Bibliotheque Universelle, Iviii., 1835. 



264 PRIMITIVE AND SECONDARY MOUNTAINS. 

orbs.-^ When it speaks of the air, the weight of which 
was unknown before the time of Gahk^o, it tells us that 
at the creation " God gave to the air its weigut ('--ro), 
and to the waters their just measure."'^ "When it speaks 
of our atmosphere and of the upper waters,^ it assigns 
to them an importance which the science of the moderns 
alone has been able to demonstrate;* seeing that, accord- 
ing to their calculations, the force annually employed 
by nature for the formation of clouds is equal to an 
amount of work which the whole human race could not 
do in less than 200,000 years. ^ And when it separates 
the higher waters from the lower, it is by an expansion^ 
and not by a solid sphere, as its imprudent translators 
would do, both in Greek and in Latin. When it speaks 
of the mountains, it distinguishes them, in point of 
fact, into primitive and secondary ; it speaks of them 
as generated^ as raised^ as melted like wax ; it lowers the 
valleys ; in a word, it speaks as a geological poet of our 
own days would do. ^ The mountains arose, O Lord, 
and the valleys went down unto the place which thou 
hadst founded for them."^ When it speaks of the hu- 
man races of every tribe, of every colour, and of every 
language, it gives one and the same origin, notwith- 
standing that the philosophy of all ages would so often 
have revolted against this truth; which we have seen 
that of the moderns forced at length to acknowledge.^ 
When it speaks of the internal state of our globe, it 
declares to us two great facts, of which the learned were 



• The oscillations of the ecliptic, including both sides of its mean 
position, cannot exceed l^ degree. 

2 Job. xxviii. 25. s Qen. i. 7. 

* See Leslie's Calculations. 

8 Annuaire du Bur. des Longitudes, 1835, p. 196. Arago, in this 
calculation, supposes that 800 millions! form the po]iulatiou of the 
globe, and that the half only of that number can work. 

6 Ps. civ. 8, 6, 9; (len. ii. 14, viii. 4; Pt". xo. '1; Prov. viii. 23; Ps. 
xcvii. 5, cxliv. 6; Zech. xiv. 4, 8; Ezek. xlvii. 

7 See Sumner, The Records of the Cn'aiion.\o\. i. p. 286; and 
Professor Zimmerman, Histoire Qeograpkiqiie cU l^Homme; Wise- 
man, Third Discourse on the Natural History of the llumun Race, 
vol. i. p. 149. 



INCONSIDERABLE DEPTH OF THE SEA. 265 

long ignorant, but now rendered incontestable by their 
last discoveries; the one relating to its solid crust, and 
the other to the great waters which it covers. "When 
it speaks of its solid envelope, it informs us, that if its 
surface gives us bread, underneath (rr-^rhn) the earth is 
ON FiRE;^ that, besides, it is reserved unto fire, and 
that it will be burnt in the last times, with all the works 
that are therein.^ And when it speaks of the waters 
which our globe contains, it alone accounts, at least 
in this respect, for the immense cataclysms which (ac- 
cording to what we are told by men of science them- 
selves) have completely, and for long periods, submerged 
it at different epochs. And while the latter tell us of 
the inconsiderable depth of the seas ; while they assure 
us that a rise of two hundred metres only, or of once- 
and-a-half the height of the tower of Strasbourg, would 
suffice for the disappearance of the Baltic, the North 
Sea, the English and St George's Channels ; and that 
Mont Blanc, or at least Chimborazo, if thrown into 
the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean, would be found 
high enough to form an island; while La Place thought 
there was ground to conclude, from the size of the tides, 
that the mean depth of the ocean does not exceed a 
million of metres (the height of the Saleve or of Hecla); 
while w^e have thus demonstrated to us the absolute 
insufficiency of the seas for these immense submersions 
which our globe has undergone ; . . . . the Scripture 
teaches us that the earth was taken out of the w^ater, 
and subsists in the water,^ " and that its solid crust 
covers a great deep (a-.nn.), the waters of which were 
broken up ('.ypas), with surges and violence,* at the epoch 
of the deluge, as at that of chaos and of the countless 
ages that preceded it." When it speaks of the deluge, 
it supposes submersions and subversion's, which all 
unbelievers of former times said were too great to be 
believed, and which at the present day geologists have 

1 Job xxviii. 5. Literally, " Underneath it is turned up, and aa 
it were tire." 
• 2 Pet. iii. 7, 10. ^ 2 Pet. iii. 5, " Gen. vii. 11. 



266 SUBMARINE FIRES. 

found too insufficient rather to explain all the subver- 
sions which our earth has discovered to them. When 
it relates the preparatives and the progressive steps of 
that immense cataclysm, it reveals facts which the 
science of the moderns may not yet have universally 
adopted, but neither has it been able to contradict them 
by other facts : it assumes the existence of an interior 
fire, which, by raising the temperature of the seas 
and of the deep waters, must have produced, on the 
one hand, an enormous evaporation, and impetuous 
rains, as if the flood-gates of the heavens had been 
opened; and, on the other, a resistless dilatation, which 
not only raised the waters from their abysses, broke 
up the fountains of the great deep, and swelled 
them into mighty waves reaching to the top of the 
highest mountains,^ but caused immense stratifications 
of carbonate of lime, under the double acti(m of an 
enormous heat and of a pressure equivalent to 80,000 
atmospheres. AVhen it describes the state of our globe, 
in the days which preceded the bringing of order out 
of chaos, it assumes the existence in it of an internal 
heat, and of submarine fires, while covering the whole 
of it with water in a liquid state.^ When it speaks of the 
creation of birds and fishes, it assigns them a common 
origin ; and we know that modern naturalists have 
ascertained, that between those two classes of animals 

I Water dilates by l-23d in passing from the temperature of 
meltini;- ice to that of boiling water : a rise of 16 or 17 degrees of 
Reaumur will augment its volume, then, by 1-1 11th. Now we find, 
by an easy calcuhition, that the quantity of water necessary to sub- 
merge the earth to the height of 1-1 000th of the radiu< of our globe, 
is equal to l-833d of its entire volume, or to 1-11 1th of it<^ third. If, 
then, we suppose the third of tlie terrestrial globe to be metallic 
(at the specific mean weight of 12.^), tliat the second third is solid 
(at the weight of 2A), and that the third third is water; tnen. Ist, 
the mean specific weight of the whole globe will be equal to 5^ 
(according to the conclusions of Maskeline and of Cavendish); and, 
'2d, a rise of 16 degrees of Reaumur in the mean tcmpcmture of the 
mass of the waters, would suffice, in the days of the deluge, to sub- 
merge the earth to the depth of 6368 metres — that is to say, to l.'i-^S 
metren above Mont Blanc. This was very nearly tlie liyi)otlK'sii 
previouslv suggested by Sir Henry Knglefieid. 

8 Gen. 12. 



SUBTERRANEAN WATERS. 267 



there are deep-seated points of resemblance, winch there 
is nothing to indicate to our eyes, but which are re- 
vealed in their anatomy, and even in the microscopic 
form of the globules of their blood.^ When it lays an 
arrest on the sun — that is to say, on the earth's rotation 
— in the days of Joshua the son of Nun, it takes care, 
too, to make the moon to stop also, in the same propor- 
tion with the sun, and from the same cause ; a precau- 
tion, as Chaubard has shown,^ which never would have 
been thought of by an astronomy that was a stranger 
to the knowledge of our daily movement ; since, after 
all, nothing more was required for the purposes of this 
miracle than the prolongation of the day.^ When it 
speaks of the Lord's coming as a flash of lightning, in the 
twinkling of an eye, at the last day, it once more bears 
witness to the rotation of the earth, and to the exist- 
ence of the antipodes ; for, at that solemn moment, it 
says it will be day for one part of men, and it will be 
night at the same hour for another part.* When it de- 
scribes the past and future riches of the land of Canaan, 
to which a marvellous force of vegetation is promised 
for the last times, it speaks of it as rich, not only in 
springs, but in subterranean waters,^ and seems to anti- 
cipate the perforations by which the moderns have 
learned to fertilize an arid country, by boring the soil, 
so as to cause water to gush up. When it speaks of 
the language of men, it gives it a primitive unity, which 
a first study of our innumerable idioms seems to contra- 
dict, but which comes to be confirmed by a more pro- 

1 Memoires du Dr J. L. Prevost, a Geneve. 

2 Elemens de Geologie par Chaubard; 1 vol. in 8vo, Paris. — The 
author establishes there, by numerous arguments, the chronological 
coincidence of Joshua's miracle with the deluges of Ogyges and 
Deucalion. He there remarks, that these two cataclysms relate to 
the same epoch, lasted the same time, were accompanied with the 
same catastrophes, and produced currents in the same direction, 
flowing from west to east. 

3 Josh. X. 12. 4 Luke xvii. 31, 34 ; Matt. xxiv. 3. &c. 
6 Deut. viii. 7 : "A land of brooks of water, of fountains, and depths 

that spring out of valleys and hills " (ri)2'nn). See also Isa, xxxv. 6 ; 
Ezek. xxxi. 4; Ps. Ixxviii. 15, 16. 



268 DIMENSIONS OF THE ARK. 

found examination. When it describes the deliverance 
of Noah, it gives to the ark dimensions which we at 
first sight pronounce to be too small, which we would 
have made a hundred times greater had we been 
charged with that narrative, but which a study. of the 
fact has made appear sufficient. When it speaks to us 
of the number of the stars, instead of supposing them 
to be a thousand (1022), as in the catalogue of Hip- 
parchus, or as in that of Ptolemy; whilst, in both 
hemispheres taken together, the most practised eyes are 
incapable of discovering more than five thousand ; whilst, 
before the invention of the telescope, a man could not 
see, even in the finest night, more than a thousand, the 
Scripture calls them innumerable ; it compares theip, 
as Herschel would do, to sand on the sea-shore ; it tells 
us that God has sown them with his hand in the im- 
mensity of space like dust, and that, nevertheless, " he 
calls them all by their name." When it speaks of that 
immensity, hark with what a learned and divine wis- 
dom it portrays it to you! how guarded it remains in 
its noble poesy, and how wise in its sublimity ! " The 
heavens declare the glory of God, and the expanse 
showeth his handywork. There is no speech nor lan- 
guage ; nevertheless we hear their voice." When it 
speaks of the relations borne by the stars to this sublu- 
nary world, instead of supposing them animated, as the 
ancients did — instead of ever attributing to them some 
influence on human affairs, as was fondly imagined for 
so long a period even by the professedly Christian 
populations of Italy and France, down to the days of the 
Reformation, they are composed of inert matter, it tells 
you, shining, no doubt, but passively acted upon. The 
heavens, even the heaven of heavens, advance with the 
order, consistency, and unity of an army which ad- 
vances to battle. " Lift up your eyes on high, and 
behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out 
their host by number; he calleth them all by names ; 
not one faileth. Why sayest thou, O Jacob, My way 
is hid from the Lord, and my judgment is passed o\i.r 



THE SCRIPTURAL HEAVENS. 2 GO 

from my God ?"^ When it describes the heavens, it 
takes care to distinguish three ; first, the heaven of the 
birds, of tempests, of the powers of the air and spiritual 
wickednesses; next, the heaven of the stars; and, 
finally, the third heaven^ the heaven of heavens. But 
when it speaks of the God of all this, mark how beau- 
tiful its language ! The sound of his thunder is in the 
rotundity of the air, it tells us ; ^ but the heavens, and 
even the heaven of heavens, cannot contain hini.^ " In 
what place would you enclose him ? and what likeness 
will ye compare unto him ? He hath set his glory aboye 
the heavens, and he even humbleth himself when he 
beholds the heavens ! AVere you to take the wings of 
the morning, and fly with the speed of light, whither 
shouldst thoQ go from his face, or whither shouldst thou 
flee from his presence?"* But after having deemed 
that it has said enough of all those visible grandeurs, it 
tells us that " these are but the skirts of his ways ; and 
how small is the portion that we know of them ! " And, 
finally, when holy Scripture thinks enough has been 
said of all the grandeurs even of the Creator of these 
immensities, listen to it farther. " He telleth the num- 
ber of the stars," it says to you, " and he healeth the 
broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds."^ "Won- 
derful in counsel, and magnificent in the means he 
employs, he putteth thy tears into his bottle ; a sparrow 
falleth not to the ground without his permission ; the 
very hairs of your head are numbered." ^ " The eternal 
God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting 
arms."^ "O my God, how manifold are thy works! 
and thou hast magnified thy Word above all thy 
name ! " * 

And now, amid all these proofs of greatness » . . . 



» Isa. xl. 26, 27. 

8 Pb. Ixxvii 18. 3 1 Kings viii. 27. 

* Isa. xl. 18; Ps. viii. 1, «xiii. 6, cxxxix. 7. 

» Ps. cxlvii. 3, 4, 

« Ps. Ivi. 8; Isa. xxviii. 29; Matt. x. 29, 30. 

7 Deut. xxxiii. 26, 27. ^ pg_ cxxxviii. 2. 



270 DIFFICFLTTES BECOME PROOFS. 

"' where shall wisdom he found ? and where is the place 
of understanding ? The depth saith, It is not in me ; 
and the sea answers, It is not with me ! God alone 
understandeth the way thereof, and he knoweth the 
place thereof. . . . He who looketh unto the ends of the 
earth, and seeth under the whole heaven ; to make the 
weight for the winds ; and he weigheth the waters by 
measure. When he made a decree for the rain and a 
way for the lightning of the thunder ; then did he see 
wisdom, and sound it to the bottom ; and unto man he 
said, Behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom ; and 
to depart from evil, is understanding ! "^ 

Such, then, is the inspiration of the holy Scriptures ; 
and it is thus we may see there celestial reflections em- 
anating from the very places where people had thought 
they might detect blemishes. If, with a calm and re- 
verential hand, you uplift the veil of obscurity with 
which it required, on your account, to shroud its face, you 
will discover there a majestic brightness ; for it comes 
down, as Moses did, from the holy mountain, and brings 
to you in its hands the tables of the testimony ! At the 
very place where you had dreaded an obscurity, you find 
a splendour ; at the place where people had noted an 
objection, God has turned it into a testimony ; at the 
place where there was a doubt, you find an assurance. 

"We conclude, then, again, that with regard to this 
seventh objection, the difficulties become proofs ; and 
that, on this head, as well as on so many others, we 
cannot fail at every page to recognise in the whole of 
the Bible a communication from God. 

But let us listen farther to a last objectioii, 

* Job zxTuL 



©ECLARATIONS OF ST PAUL. 271 

SECTION VII. 

THE DECLARATIONS OF PAUL HIMSELF 

It is idle to dream of disputing the fact of a partial 
and intermittent inspiration in the Scriptures (we are 
sometimes told) since the apostle Paul himself has clearly- 
decided the question. Has he not carefully, in point 
of fact, distinguished what he pronounced by inspi- 
ration from what he advanced in his own name only, 
as a simple believer ? And do we not find him, in his 
First Epistle to the Corinthians, express this distinction 
in the clearest manner, and three several times, on the 
occasion of the several questions that had been addressed 
to him on the subject of marriage ? 

First of all, at the 25th verse of chapter vii., when he 
says in so many terms, " Now, concerning virgins, I 
have no commandment of the Lord ; yet I give an ad- 
vice as one that hath obtained mercy of the Lord to be 
faithful;" 

Next, at the 10th verse, when he ^vrites, "And 
unto the married I command (not I, but the Lord), 
Let not the wife depart from her husband, and let not 
the husband put away his wife ;" 

And finally, at the 12th verse, where he adds, "But 
to the rest speak I, not the Lord (I, and not the Lord), 
If any brother hath a wife that believeth not, . . . let 
him not put her away," &c. 

One sees clearly, then, say the objectors, from these 
three sentences, that there are in the apostle's epistles, 
passages that are Paul's, and other passages that are 
God's ; that is to say, inspired passages and others that 
are not so. 

The reply is easy. 

No sooner do we examine more narrowly into the 
passages on which the objection is laid, than we per- 
25 



272 ST Paul's declarations analyzed. 

ceive that they cannot he legitimately employed against 
the doctrine of a plenary inspiration. Far from impos- 
ing limits on the divinity of the apostolic sayings, these 
verses, on the contrary, hold a language ^vhich the 
most entire and sovereign inspiration alone could au- 
thorize. Paul could not speak thus w^ithout putting his 
epistles, as Peter has done, I was about to say '^ on 
A LEVEL with THE OTHER lioly Scriptures," we must say 
ABOVE them (inasmuch as he gives utterance there to a 
more recent and more obligatory expression of the Lord's 
desires). We proceed to judge how far this is the case. 
What is it that, in this 7th chapter, the apostle of Jesus 
Christ does? He treats three cases of conscience. As 
to one of these cases, God, says he, has neither com- 
manded nor interdicted any thing. " He that marrieth 
his virgin sinneth not. I am not, therefore, charged with 
any order ; but, in my character as an apostle, it is only 
ayi advice that I have to give you on the Lord's part." 
— and he then takes care to add, at the 40th verse, 
" And I think, also, that T have the Spirit of God." 
The Lord, therefore, here desires to leave you free, says 
the apostle ; he would not lay a snare for you ; and if 
you do not think yourselves bound to follow the general 
advice that is given you, you violate no command- 
ment — you sin not. Only, he who marries does well; 
he who marries not, does better. 

As for the other case, on the contrary, beware ; for 

THERE IS A COMMANDMENT CF THE LoRD. The Lord 

has already pronounced his will (Matt. v. 31, 32 ; Mai. 
ii. 14, 15); and I have nothing new to declare unto 
you : the Old Testament and Jesus Christ have spoken. 
It is NOT I, therefore, the apostle of Jesus Christ, it is 
THE Lord who has already made known his will to 
you : " To such Christians as are married, I command 
(not I, but the Lord), that the wife depart not from her 
husband, and that the husband put not away his wife." 
-(Verses 10, 11.) 

But, as for the third case, that is to say, as respects 
the brethren who may find themselves united to ujib.>- 



ST PAULS DECLARATIONS ANALYZED. 273 

lieving wives, you have a commandment of the Lord's 
under the Old Testament ; " I have repealed it ; and / 
think that Ihace the Spirit of God ! I abolish, therefore, 
the old order of things, and am commissioned to put a 
contrar}' order in its place. It is not the Lord (v. 12), 
that tells you to keep with you an unbelieving wife ; it 
is I, Paul, the apostle of Jesus Christ, not of men, 
neither by man, but by God the Father, and by Jesus 
Christ, whom he raised from the dead."^ 

Here, then, we see it as clear as noonday, that the 
apostle, instead of appealing to the Lord's utterance of 
old, repeals it, in order to substitute an opposite order 
in its place ; so that this passage, far from invalidating 
inspiration, fully confirms it ; seeing that it w^oulfl 
amount to the most outrageous blasphemy, if the apostle 
had not felt that in holding this language he Avas the 
mouth of God, and had he ventured to say of his own 
proper authority, " It is not the Lord, it is I ! I, I say, 
and not the Lord — if any brother has an unbelieving 
wife, let him not send her away ! " — The Lord had said 
the very contrary.^ 

TVe must acknowledge, then, that these verses of St 
Paul, far from oriving their sanction to the supposition of 
any human mixture in the w^ri tings of the New Testa- 
ment, stand there to attest to us that in their epistles, and 
in the most familiar details of their epistles, the apostles 
were the mouth of God, and placed themselves, not 
only in the same line with Moses and the ancient pro- 
phets, but, further, above them ; inasmuch as a second 
expression of God's will ought to take precedence of 
that which went before it ; and as the New Testament 
ought to surpass the Old, if not in excellence, at least 
in authority. 

We have heard some persons still fm-ther oppose to 
us, as an admission of the intermittence and imperfec- 
tion of his inspiration, those words of St Paul, in which, 

1 Gal. i. 1. 2 Deut. viL 3; 1 Kings xi. 2; Ezra x. 2, 3, 11, 19. 



274 ST Paul's confessed ignouance. 

after haying told the Corinthians^ of his having been 
caught up into the third heaven, he adds, " Whether in 
the body or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knou-eth." 
" Can it be supposed," it has been said, " that the Holj 
Ghost knew not how this miracle was performed ? Ne- 
cessarily, therefore, we must refer such a verse to Paul, 
not to God." 

We reply, that though the Holy Ghost was not igno- 
rant of it, Paul was ; and that the Holy Ghost desired 
that Paul himself should tell us of his ignorance. Can 
it be forgotten that God has never ceased, in revealing 
himself to us in the Scriptures, to employ the personality 
of the sacred writers, and that it is under this form that 
he has desired almost constantly to instruct his Church ? 
When David, " speaking by the Spirit,"^ exclaims in 
the Psalms, " that he acknowledges his transgressions, 
and that his sin is ever before him, and that he was 
shapen in iniquity," it is not the Holy Ghost, doubtless, 
that acknowledges his own transgressions, and that has 
his own sin before his eyes ; but it is the Holy Ghost 
that put, for our sakes, those expressions of repentance 
in the heart and on the lips of his humbled prophet. 
It was in an analogous sense, then, that He could make 
St Paul say, " Whether in the body, I cannot tell : God 
knoweth." 

We are not yet done, however, with these objections. 
There still remain three more, which we have called 
evasions ; because, instead of resting, like the former, 
on some certain argument, or facts, they are rather 
systems by which people imagine they can withdraw a 
part of the Scriptures from the action of the divine in- 
spiration. It remains for us, therefore, to examine 
these. 

1 2 Oor. xii. 2, 3. ' Mark xiL 36; Acts !▼. 2b. 



EVASIONS EXAMINED. 275 



CHAPTER Y. 



EXAMINATION OF EVASIONS. 



Several systems of exceptions, we have said, have 
been proposed by some. There are persons who, while 
they fully admit that the thoughts found in Scripture 
have been given by God, would maintain, nevertheless, 
that its style and expressions are purely human ; others 
have excluded the inspiration of the historical books; 
others, in fine, would make an exception of certain de- 
tails, at least, which to them have appeared too trite, 
and too remote from edification, to admit of our attri- 
buting them to the Spirit of God. 



SECTION I. 

MIGHT NOT INSPIRATION PERTAIN TO THE THOUaHTS ONLY, 
WITHOUT EXTENDING TO THE WORDS? 

" The prophets and the apostles," some say, " were, no 
doubt, inspired when they wrote their sacred books, in 
so far as respected their thoughts; but we must believe, 
that, beyond this, they were left to themselves as re- 
spects their language ; so that in this written revelation 
the ideas are God's, and the expressions those of a 
man. The task of the sacred writei's resembles, in 
some sort, that of a man before whose eyes there have 
been successively passed some very highly coloured pic- 
tures, while he has been charged to describe them 



276 INSPIRATION NECESSARILY EXTENDS TO WORDS. 

merely in so far as they have passed ])efore his eyes. 
It is thus that the Divine Spirit is considered to have 
presented the holy truths they announce to the view of 
the evangelists and the prophets, leaving them no more 
to do than simply to express them ; and this mode of 
conceiving of what they did," it is added, " at once ac- 
counts for the striking differences of style which their 
writings exhibit." 

"We reply: — 

1. That this system is directly contrary to Scripture 
testimony. The Bible declares itself to he written, 
" not with the words which man's wisdom teacheth, 
but which the Holy Ghost teacheth." ^ It calls itself 
" the word of God," " the words of God," ^ " the voice 
of God," " the oracles of God," ^ " the lively oracles of 
God,"* " the holy letters of God,"^ " the scripture of 
God." A scripture^ or writing, is made up of letters 
and words, and not of invisible thoughts only: but, we 
are told,^ ''all Scripture is given by inspiration of 
God." What is written, therefore, is inspired of God 
{ho'XvzvGrog)', and that which is inspired of God is all 
Scripture — it is all that is written (crafra y^a^ri). 

2. While this system is contradictory to the Bible, 
it is also most irrational. The ideas of our fellow- men 
embody themselves in words ; and it is there only that 
you can seize them. Souls are revealed to us only in 
the flesh. You do not learn their character; you know 
nothing of their desires or their experiences ; you do 
not even suspect their existence; and betwixt you and 
them there are no ties, until they have become clothed 
with bodies, and have received organs, so that they can 
manifest themselves to you. My most intimate friend 
is known to me only by the language of his voice and 
his gestures. If he had no power of employing these, 
in vain might he remain for twenty years at my side : 
he would be to me as if he were not. 

» 1 Cor. ii. 13. « Throughout. » Rom. iii. 2. 

* Acts vii. 38. * 2 Tim. iii. 15. « 2 Tim. iii. 16. 



LANGUAOK THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL. 277 

More than this. There exists, in so far as ue are 
concerned, an inevitable dependance between souls and 
their organs, betwixt their ideas and words. Not only 
do we come to know the existence of the former only 
by the language of the latter, but (even after they have 
spoken to us) we can but guess only at their true 
character, as long as we have not the assurance that 
the organ has been the faithful interpreter of the mind, 
that the word has truly reflected the idea, and the pro- 
position the thought. And if we have some room to 
apprehend that language has not been the pliant and 
adequate servant of the will, we possess no certainty 
that we have not been mistaken. Though we might 
know that God himself had placed in the soul of a 
writer the purest thoughts of heaven, still there would 
always be required, in order to our having through 
these Avords a certain revelation of them, that there 
should be given us the assurance that the language is 
exact, that the reflections are faithful, and that they re- 
produce to us without alteration the objects deposited 
in the secret chambers of that soul. 

Language, then, is the wondrous mirror which re- 
flects to us the depths of the soul. 

Were you a son weeping for the loss of a mother, and 
w^re God, for your consolation, to desire that you should 
see again, for some moments, in a looking-glass, the ever- 
to-be -venerated features of that mother, would it be 
enough that she herself were made to come down be- 
hind you and occupy the place where the reflected light 
would come from the object to your eyes in most abund 
ance? Doubtless not, it would further be necessary 
that the mirror should be without any twist, fuiTow, or 
blemish. Were it unequal and faithless, of what use 
would it be to you ? You would have near you, it is 
true, the smiling features of your own mother ; her 
inimitable look would bear towards you the ardent ex- 
pression of her maternal good wishes and her august 
benediction ; but all this would be in vain ; you would 
have no better than a stranger before your eyes, one 



278 NON VERBAL INSPIRATION UTTERL\ UNTENABLE. 

perhaps of a hideous expression — a deformed creature, 
with features positively revolting I O my good mother, 
it is, then, no longer you ! you would exclaim. Thus 
would it also he for you with the thoughts of God, if 
left to receive them disfigured by the errors of the 
human language that reflected them to us. It is no 
longer thou, O thought of my God ! we should have 
to say to it. It is necessary then for our security, that 
we should have the divine guarantee as well for the 
fidelity of the mirror as for the faithfulness of the 
objects. 

These reflections will sufi&ce, no doubt, to enable us 
to comprehend how irrational it is to think of receiving 
with exactness and certainty the thoughts of another 
through the medium of inexact and uncertain expres- 
sions. Can you lay hold of these thoughts otherwise 
than by words? And without God's words, how can 
you be sure of possessing his thoughts ? 

3. This theory of a divine revelation, in which you 
would have the inspiration of the thoughts without the 
inspiration of the language, is so inevitably irrational 
that it cannot be sincere, and proves false even to those 
who propose it ; for, without their suspecting it, it 
makes them come much further down in their arguments 
than their first position seems at a first glance to indicate. 
Listen to them. Though the words are those of man, 
say they, the thoughts are those of God. And how 
will they prove this to you ? Alas ! once more, by at- 
tributing to this Scripture from God, contradictions, 
mistakes, proofs of ignorance ! Is it then tlie words 
alone that tliey attack ? and are not these alleged errors 
much more in the ideas than in the words ? 80 true it 
is that Ave cannot separate the one from the otlier, and 
that a revelation of God's thoughts ever demands a re- 
velation of God's words also. 

4. This theory is not only antibiblical, irrational, and 
mischievous ; further, it is taken up arbitrarily, and 
amounts at best to a gratuitous hypothesis. 

5. Besides, it is very useless; for it resolves no dif- 



IT RESOLVES NO DIFFICULTY. 279 

ficulty. You find it difficult, say you, to conceive how 
tlie Holy Ghost could have given the words in Holy 
Scripture ; but can you tell us any better how he gave 
the thoughts? Will it be more easy for you, for ex- 
ample, to explain how God suggested to Moses the 
knowledge of the difterent acts of the creation, or to St 
John that of all the scenes of the last day, than to con- 
ceive how he made them write the narrative of these 
things in the language of the Hebrews, or in that of the 
Greeks ? 

6. But we have much more to say than this. That 
which in this theory ought above all to strike every 
attentive mind, is its extreme inconsistency, seeing that 
those even who hold it most strenuously, are forced 
withal to admit that, in its greatest part, the Scripture 
behoved to be inspired to the men of God even in its 

WORDS. 

Suppose that the Holy Ghost were to call on you to 
go down this morning to the public street, there to pro- 
claim, in Russian or in Tamil, " the wonderful works 
of God;" what would become of you, were he to be 
content with inspiring you with ideas, without giving 
you words ? You might have the third heaven before 
your eyes, and in your heart the transports of arch- 
angels, still you would have to remain as if dumb and 
stupid before the persons composing this multitude. In 
order to your inspiration being of any use to you, it 
would be necessary that the periods, the phrases, and 
even the smallest words of your discourse, should be 
entirely given to you ? What do I say ? People might 
very well dispense with your own thoughts, provided 
you could make them hear, without even understanding 
them, the thoughts of God in the words of God, Well, 
then, let us carry this supposition into Jerusalem, and 
into the persons of the apostles. When the fishermen 
of Capernaum and Bethsaida, met in their upper cham- 
ber on the day of Pentecost, received the command to 
come down, and to go forth and publish, before that 
people which had assembled from every region under 



280 ARGUMENT FROM PARTICULAR EXAMPLES. 

heaven, the wonderful works of God, in Latin, in Par- 
thian, in Elamite, in Chaldean, in Coptic, in Arabic, 
would not the giving of the words be necessary ? What 
could they have done on that occasion without the 
words? Why, nothing; while, with their words, they 
could convert the world ! 

When, afterwards, in the church of Corinth, the 
faithful who had received miraculous powers spoke in 
the midst of the congregations in strange tongues, and 
found it necessary that some other, to whom the gift of 
interpretation had been given, should translate after 
them the unknown words which they had uttered in 
the ears of their brethren, was it not equally necessary 
that the words and all the phrases should be entirely 
dictated to them ? ^ When all the prophets, after having 
written their sacred pages, set themselves to meditate 
upon them with so much respect and care, as they 
would have done to the oracles of a stranger prophet j 
when they meditated upon them night and day, search- 
ing what (as Peter tells us^) the Spirit of Christ which 
was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand 
the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should 
follow — was it not, then, also necessary that all the 
words should have been given them ? When Moses 
gives an account of the creation of the world, and of 
the extrication of chaos ; when Solomon describes the 
Eternal Wisdom ; when David recites, a thousand years 
beforehand, the prayers of the Son of God on the cross ; 
when Daniel relates in detail, and without very well 
understanding them himself, the remote destinies of 
the World and of the Church ; and when, in fine, John 
continues, in his own prophecies, the revelations of the 
prophet Daniel, was it not necessary that the smallest 
words should be given to them ? and do not all inter- 
preters, in reading them, acknowledge how fiir we might 
be led away from the true meaning, by the smallest word 
being put in the place of some other word, by the tense 

'iCorxiv. I Pet. i. 10, n. 



WE LOOK TO THE BOOK NOT THE WRITERS. 281 

of the verb being ill-chosen, by the imprudent placing 
of a particle ? 

From this, therefore, we must conclude, since so con- 
siderable a part of the Scriptures is necessarily inspired, 
even in its words, that the system of an inspiration of 
the thoughts, without an inspiration of the language, 
is inconsistent in the highest degree. There are not 
two kinds of the Word of God in the Holy Scriptures ; 
there are not two sorts of God's Oracles, if it was 
" as moved by the Holy Ghost that holy men spoke," 
then all the Sacred Letters are divinely inspired ; and 
that which is divinely inspired in the Sacred Letters is 
ALL Scripture. 

But these last reflections are about to conduct us to 
something at once more simple and more important. 
Here let the utmost caution be observed, for the ques- 
tion has been misrepresented. It has been said that 
the sacred Scriptures were inspired by God ; and people 
have asked themselves up to what point this behoved 
to be the case. The matter for inquiry, however, did 
not lie there. 

7. "We have said, that the question relates to the book, 
and not to the writers. You believe that God gave 
them the thoughts always, and not always the Avords ; 
but the Scripture tells us, on the contrary, that God has 
given them always the words, and not always the thoughts. 
As for their thoughts, while they were in the act of 
writing. God might inspire them with ideas more or less 
lively, more or less pure, more or less elevated : that 
interests my charity alone, but has no bearing on my 
faith. The Scripture — the Scripture wdiich they have 
transmitted to me, perhaps without themselves seizing 
its meaning, at least without ever entirely comprehend- 
ing it, this is what concerns me. 

Paul might have been mistaken in his thoughts, when, 
on appearing before the council of the priests, and not 
recognizing God's high-priest, he ventured to say to 
him, " God shall strike thee, thou whited wall ! " This 
is of little consequence, however, provided I know that 



282 THE SACRED WRITERS SOMETIMES, 

WHEN HE WRITES THE WORD OF GoD, " it is JeSUS Clirist 

that speaks in liim !"^ 

Peter might have been mistaken in his thoughts 
when, refusing to believe that God could send him 
among the heathen, he did not perceive and acknow- 
ledge that " in every nation, they who turn to God are 
accepted of him." He might have been still more 
grievously mistaken when, at Antioch, he compelled 
Paul to withstand him to the face, because he was to be 
blamed, and because he walked not uprightly according 
to the truth of the Gospel.^ But how does this concern 
me, after all, I repeat, at least as respects my faith ? For 
the question is, not how I can know at what moments, 
or in what measure, Paul, John, Mark, James, or Peter, 
were inspired in their thoughts, or sanctified in their 
conduct : what, above all, interests me, is to know that 
all the sacred pages were divinely inspired ; that their 
written words were the words of God ; and that, in giv- 
ing these to us, they spoke, not in the words which 
man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost 
teacheth,^ (oux sv didaxroTg avd^WTrlvrjg ffopiag Xoyoic) ; 
that then it is not they that speak, but the Holy 
Ghost;* in a word, that " God hath spoken by the 
MOUTH of his prophets since the world began." ^ 

The sacred writers were sometimes inspired ; but the 
Holy Scriptures were so always. Accordingly, the 
times, the measures, the degrees, the alternations of the 
inspiration of the men of God, are not for us an object 
of faith ; but that which is an object of faith, is that the 
Scripture is divinely inspired, and that that which is di- 
vinely inspired is the whole Scripture. " Not one jot or 
tittle of it shall pass away." 

There is doubtless an inspiration of thouohts, as there 
is an inspiration of words; but the first makes the 
Christian, while it is the second that makes tlie Pro- 
phet. 

A true Christian is inspired in his thoughts: the Spi- 

i2Cor. xiii. 3; ^Gal. ii. 11-U. 

"ICor. iil3. < Mark xiii. 11. « Acts iii. '21. 



THE SCRIPTURES ALWAYS INSPIRED. 2S3 

rit of God reveals to him the deep things of God ;Mt is 
not flesh and blood that have made him know the coun- 
sels of God and the glories of Jesus Christ, it is God the 
Father;^ for the Holy Ghost leads him into all truth;'' 
and he has been incapable of truly owning in his soul 
Jesus as Lord (the Lord of lords) but by the Holy 
Ghost.* Every true believer, then, is more or less in- 
spired by God in his thoughts ; but he is not so in his 
words. He is Christian, but not Prophet. The holiest 
discourses of Cyprian, Augustine, Bernard, Luther, 
Calvin, Beza, Leighton, are only the words of men on 
the truths of God — venerable words, no doubt, precious 
and powerful words, and worthy of our utmost atten- 
tion, because of the wisdom that has been given to them, 
and of the abundant expression which we find in them 
of the thought of God ; still these, after all, are but the 
words of men — they form but a sermon. It is quite 
otherwise in the case of the prophet. The latter may 
have, and he may not have, the thought of God in his 
thought ; but that which he will always have, as long 

AS HE SHALL SPEAK AS A PROPHET, is " the WOrd of 

God IN His MOUTH." The Spirit of God will speak by 
him, and the word of God will be on his tongue.^ Lie 
will be the mouth of God, a mouth intelligent or unin- 
telligent, voluntary or involuntary — that is of little con- 
sequence, provided that God's oracles flow from him, 
and that I receive the thought of my God in the words 
of my God. 

In a word, one may be a Christian without having on 
his lips the words of God, and one may be a prophet 
without having on his heart or in his understanding the 
thoughts of God ; but one cannot be a Christian without 
having in his heart the thoughts of God, and one can- 
not be a prophet without havino; on his lips the words 
of God/ ^ ^ ^ 

In the language of the Bible (this we shall ere long 
establish), a prophet is a person in whose mouth God 

1 1 Cor. ii. 10. 2 Matt. xvi. 17. a John zvi. 13. 

4 1 Cor. xii. 3. « 2 Sam. xxiii. 2. 

26 



284 KING SAUL AT SECHU AND NAIOTH. 

puts, for a time, the -words which he wishes to havtj 
uttered upon earth. Such a person prophesied only by 
intervals, " according as the Spirit gave him utterance." ^ 
One might not be a prophet, Hke King Saul, more than 
twice in his life ; and, as his soldiers, more than once.' 
One might then pronounce the words of God while 
understanding them, or iciihout understanding them, 
often even without having been previously apprized, and' 
sometimes even without having wished it. 

When Daniel had traced his last pages, he did not 
understand, he himself tells us, what the Spirit had 
made him write.^ When Caiaphas uttered prophetic 
words, " he spoke not of himself ; " he had the will, but 
he had neither the consciousness nor the comprehension 
of what God caused him to pronounce.* When Balaam 
went up three times to the top of a hill to curse Israel, 
and when, three times, words of benediction proceeded 
from his lips, as it were in spite of himself, because 
" the Lord had met him and put a word into his 
mouth," ^ he had the consciousness of what he did, but 
neither fully comprehended, nor fully icilled it. When 
Saul's armed followers went in search of David to 
Ramah, and when the Spirit of the Lord was upon 
them, so that they also prophesied; and when Saul, 
three successive times, sent others of them, who also 
three successive times prophesied ; and when the pro- 
fane Saul went himself likewise to the great well in 
Sechu, and when God (to illustrate his power, and to 
manifest more clearly to us what it is to be a prophet, 
and what his word is) had made his Spirit to come on 
that unbelieving man also; when he went on and pro- 
phesied ; when the word of the Lord was in that ordi- 
narily profane mouth, and he prophesied before Samuel 
all that day and all that night, '' what was it that hap- 
pened to the son of Kish ? Was Saul also among the 
prophets ? " ^ Yes, and Saul had the consciousness of his 
condition, and of the piu^t he acted as a prophet ; but of 

> Acts li. 4. « 1 Sam. xix. 20, 21. s Dan. xii. 8, 9. 

* .John xi. 51. » Numb, xxiii. 16. « 1 Sum. xix. 23, 24. 



CONSCIOUS BUT NOT WILLING PROPHETS. 28i 

this he had neither the full icilL nor the anticipation^ nor 
prob;ibly the full comprehension. NVlien the old prophet 
had seated himself amicably at table with the man of 
God, whom he had seduced from his road by an unbe- 
lieving and carnal kindness, and when, all of a sudden, 
under an impulse from on bigh, menacing words pro- 
ceeded in a loud voice from his mouth against his im- 
prudent and guilty guest, he prophesied with the 
consciousness of what he did, but he prophesied icithout 
having the wish to do so. What do I say ? Did not 
God make his voice be heard in the empty air, in the 
presence of Moses and of all the people, on Mount Sinai ? 
Did he not cause it to be heard by the couch of a 
child in the tabernacle at Shiloh ? To the ears of the 
three apostles, and of the two saints who had risen 
again from Hades, on Mount Tabor ? To John the 
Baptist, and to all the people, on the banks of the 
Jordan ? 

Be it well understood, then, it is the holy letters (ra 
ispcc ysoc/x/xara, 2 Tim. iii. 15); it is all that is written., 
that is to say, the phrases and the icords, that are divinely 
inspired, that are Oiorrnsvffroi. The question, then, is 
about the words, and not about the men who have 
written. As to the latter, that concerns you little. 
The Spirit was able more or less to associate their indi- 
viduality, their conscience, their recollections, their 
affections, with what he caused them to write, and you 
are iiowise obliged to know how far this was the case ; 
but that which it behoves you to know is (as St Peter 
has said), " that no written prophecy came by the 
will of man., but that it was as moved hy the Holy Ghost., 
holy men of God spake ; " and just as at Belshazzar s 
feast people troubled themselves little about knowing 
what was passing in the fingers of that terrible hand 
which came forth from the wall over against the candle- 
stick, while, on the contrary, all the thoughts of the 
guests were turned to the words that were traced on the 
plaster of the wall, " Mene., mene, tekel., upharsin" 
because they knew well that these words were from 



286 THE HISTORICAL BOOKS INSPIRED. 

God ; so likewise it concerns you little, in point of faith, 
to penetrate into what passed in the thoughts of Mark, 
the thoughts of John, the thoughts of Luke, the 
thoughts of Matthew, during the time that they were 
writing the roll of the Gospels. It behoves you rather 
to direct your entire attention towards the words which 
they have written, because you know that these words 
are from God. Be the prophet holy like Moses, wise 
like Daniel, an enemy of God like Caiaphas, ignorant 
of the language in which he speaks like the prophets at 
Corinth, impure like Balaam — what do I say? — insen- 
sible, like the hand that wrote on the wall in the palace 
at Babylon ; without form, without body, without soul, 
like the empty air in which was heard the voice of God 
(on Sinai, on the banks of Jordan, on Mount Tabor . . .), 
it is of little consequence, once more (unless it be where 
their personality itself should be found so interested as 
to make an essential part of their revelation.) Thy 
thoughts, O my God, thy thoughts and thy words, these 
are what concern me ! 



SECTION II. 

SHOULD WE EXCEPT FROM INSPIRATION THE HISTORICAL BOOKS ? 

" One will admit," we are told, " that the inspiration 
of the Scriptures might have been extended to the choice 
of expressions, wherever this miraculous operation was 
necessary : in the laying down of doctrines, for exam- 
ple, in announcing the history of a past more ancient 
than the birth of the mountains, or in unveiling a 
future which God only can know. But would you 
proceed to maintain that men who lived at the time of 
the events they relate, had any need of the Holy Ghost 
in order to tell us facts of which they themselves were 
either agents or witnesses, or which they had heard 
related by others; the humble marriage of Ruth in the 
small town of Bethlehem, for example, or the emotions 



THEIR INSPI RATION LEAST TO r.K DOUBTED. 287 

felt by Esther in the palace of Shusan, or the nomen- 
clatures of the kings of Israel and Judah, their reigns, 
their lives, their deaths, their genealogies ? — Luke, who, 
from Troas, accompanied the apostle to Jerusalem, to 
Cesarea, to the isle of Malta, and as far as Rome, had 
he not enough of recollections of \vhat had passed in 
order to tell us how Paul had been laid hold of under 
the porches of the temple; how his nephew revealed 
to him. in the castle, the conspiracy of the forty Jews; 
how the centurion took the young man to the chiet 
captain, and how the chief captain took him by the 
hand, and went with him aside privately, and asked of 
him all that he knew? Did he then absolutely require 
for facts so simple and so well-known, a continual 
intervention of power from on high ? " Some do 
not think so, and maintain, on the contrary, that it is 
neither necessary nor rational to believe that all the 
historical chapters of the two Testaments are divinely 
inspired. 

To such objections our first answer will always be 
very simple, " All Scripture," we say, " is divinely 
inspired." — Thou hast known the holy letters, O Timo- 
thy : well then, " all the holy letters, all the Scrip- 
tures are given by the breath of God." — We have 
not heard the Holy Ghost make an exception any- 
where to these declarations ; accordingly, neither in 
man, nor in angel, do we acknowledge any right to 
hazard any. 

But we will say more. "Were it allowable to place 
one book of God before another — if we must distin- 
guish in the firmament of the Scriptures the more 
glorious constellations and stars of the first magnitude, 
we should certainly give the preference to the historical 
books. — In fact : ' 

1. It is to the historical books that the most striking 
and most respectful testimonies are rendered by the 
prophets in the Old Testament, and by the apostles in 
the New. — What is there more holy in the Old than 
the Pentateuch ? what is there sreater in the New than 



288 TESTIMONIES TO THE HISTORICAL BOOKS. 

the four (xospels ? — Is it not solely of the historical 
books of the Bible that it is written : " The law of the 
Lord is perfect ; his testimonies are wonderful ; they 
are sure ; they make wise the simple ; they are pure ; 
they are more to be desired than gold ; the words of 
the Lord are pure words ; they are like silver seven 
times refined. Blessed is the man who meditates on 
his law day and night."'- 

2. Besides, mark with what respect our Lord him- 
self QUOTES TiiEM, and how in doing so he takes a 
pleasure in pointing to the smallest details in the divine 
decrees, and sometimes to the use of a single word. 

3. The histories in the Bible have not })een given 
us solely for the transmission to future ages of the 
memorials of past events : they are presented to the 
Church of all ages, for the purpose of making her 
know by facts the character op her God ; they are 
there as a mirror of providence and grace ; they are 
destined to reveal to us God's thoughts, God's designs, 
the invisible things of God, his heaven, his glory, his 
angels, and those mysteries which the angels desire to 
look into.^ — For all this the most entire inspiration is 
requisite. 

4. Remark further, that the historical Scriptures are 
given to us for the purpose of revealing to us the deep 
things op MAN. It has been said of the Word of God, 
" that it pierces like a sword, to the division of the soul 
and spirit ; that all is naked and open to it, and that 
it is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the 
heart." This holds true of the written Word as well as 
of the personal Word of God, for the one is the lan- 
guage of the other ; but it is especially true of the his- 
torical word. Do you not see that that word, in its 
narratives, is a two-edged sword, and that it tries men's 
consciences ? And in like manner as it describes to you 
what took place on our globe in the days of chaos, when 
the Spirit of God moved on the face of the abyss, it 

» Pa. xix. 7-10; i. 1, '2. «1 Pot. i. 12. 



mi:n could not describe tiik angels. 289 



equally tells you of what takes place in the ahyss of the 
human heart, the mysteries of the invisible world, the 
secret motives, the hidden faults, and many a thought 
which, but for it, would only have been known in the 
great day when the I-ord will bring to light things hid 
in darkness, and will make manifest the purposes of 
men's hearts. Is it thus, then, that men write history ? 
5. The historical Scriptures behoved on another ac- 
count to have the most entire inspiration, namely, in 
order that they might relate to us without any error 
the mysterious interventions of the angels in this 
world's affairs, in those of the Church, and in those of 
Heaven. Is there a subject more delicate, more novel, 
more difficult ? Do not those ardent and pure, hum- 
ble and sublime creatures, whose existence we know of 
only from the Bible, differ as much from man as the 
heavens differ from the earth ? Was any thing similar 
to the angels ever conceived by the imaginations of the 
peoples, by their poets, or by their sages ? No, they 
never even show the slightest approach to it. One will 
perceive, then, how impossible it was, without a con- 
stant operation on the part of God, that the biblical 
narratives, in treating of such a subject, should not 
have constantly borne the all too human impression of 
our narroAv conceptions ; and that the sacred writers 
should not have often let slip from their pen imprudent 
touches, investing the angels by turns with attributes 
too divine, or affections too human. All nations have 
taken a fancy for figuring to themselves invisible beings. 
as the inhabitants of the celestial regions, whom they 
have tricked out with all those marks of superiority 
that charm the heart of man. But how have all their 
conceptions been creeping, childish, and vulgar, com- 
pared with what the angels are ! How have all those 
creations of our fancy been comparatively earthly, pas- 
sionate, selfish, impure, and often odious ! See the 
gods, the demigods, and the whole Olympus of the 
ancients ; see the fairies, the genii, and the sylphs of 
the moderns : see even farther, the angels of Scripture 



2.90 ONENESS OF THE ANGELIC CHARACTER. 

speedily disfigured in the books of man, in the Apoc- 
rypha of Enoch, for example, in several of the Fathers, 
in the legends of Rome, and even in the more recent 
creations of several of the French poets. Winged pas- 
sions, devout puerilities, sacrilegious idols, immortal 
egotisms, celestial wickednesses, deified impurities ! 
But study the angels of Scripture; there not only is 
every thing great, holy, and worthy of God ; not only 
is that character at once ardent and sublime, compas- 
sionate and majestic, constantly recalled to us by their 
names, their attributes, their employments, their dwell- 
ings, their hymns, their contemplations of the depths of 
redemption, and the ineffable joys of their love; but 
that which above all ought to strike us, is the perfect 
harmony of all this as a whole ; it is that all these fea- 
tures accord together; it is that all these attributes cor- 
respond to each other, and maintain themselves in the 
justest proportions. 

In a word, this whole doctrine, sustained from one 
end to the other of the Scriptures, throughout a course 
of fifteen hundred 3^ears, presents to us a unity which 
of itself alone will be found to attest the inimitable 
reality of its object, but w^hich bears the most striking 
testimony to their entire inspiration. 

While all the mythologies speak to us of the inha- 
bitants of the moon and of the planets, the Bible says 
not a word of them : it says nothing to us abt)Ut the 
second heaven ; but it pictures to us, ^vith no less ful- 
ness than precision, the sublime inhabitants of the third 
heaven, or of the heaven of heavens. This sul^ject recurs 
constantly there, and under the most varitd forms. 
Descriptions of the angels are often found in the 
Bible; descriptions unembarrassed, full of details, inde- 
pendent of each other. They are exhibited to us in all 
situations in heaven and on earth, before CJod and with 
nien, ministers employed in executing acts ot mercy 
and sometimes also acts of vengeance, bat hid in the 
radiance of the divine glory, standing before ^M)d and 
\vorshij»ping him night and day ; but also eii-iiged in 



BEAUTY OF THE ANGELIC CHARACTER. 291 

ministering to the humblest believers, helping them in 
their distresses, in their travels, in their imprisonments, 
on their deathbeds; and finally coming, at the last day, 
on the clouds of heaven, ^vith the Son of man, to re- 
move all the wicked from his kingdom, and to gather 
in his elect from the four winds. 

And what were the historians of the angels ? Let us 
not forget this : some were shepherds ; others were 
kings, or soldiers, or priests, or fishermen, or tax-ga- 
therers; some writing in the days of Hercules, of Jason 
and the Argonauts, three hundred years before the war 
of Tro}'^; others in the age of Seneca, of Tacitus, and of 
Juvenal. And yet we see that the^relater has the same 
beings throughout before his eyes. Unlike men, they 
are always like themselves. We are defiled, they are 
perfect ; we are selfish, they glow with love ; we are 
haughty, they are gentle and meek. We are vain and 
proud in a body which wdll be gnawed by the worms, 
they are humble in their glory and immortality. We 
would sometimes fain worship them ; " See thou do it 
not," they say to us, "• I am but thy fellow-servant ! " ' 
We are disquieted with lusts, they are fervent in spirit, 
they neither marry nor are given in marriage, for they 
cannot die.^ We are hard-hearted, they are compas- 
sionate ; Ave leave the poor Lazarus to groan as he lies 
famished at our gate and our dogs lick his sores, but 
they come to take him when he is dead, and convey 
him' away to Abraham's bosom ;^ they utter shouts of 
joy at the conversion of a sinner ; and yet, Jesus said, 
" the angel of one of these litrle ones continually be- 
holds in the heavens the face of my Father." * Such 
is the angel of the whole of the Scriptures. 

Now, let each ask himself, how, without a constant 
inspiration of all the historical books, it could have 
happened, that over a course of so many ages, not one 
of the authors who had occasion to bring such beings 
before us, has let slip, with regard to them, either words 

1 Apoc. xxii. 9. 2 Luke xx. 36. 

8 Liike xvi. 22. * Matt, xviii. 10. 



292 SCRIPTURE HISTORY PROPHETICAL. 

fraught with excessive respect, after the manner of the 
liturgies of Rome, or other words bearing too much of 
the impress of our humanity, after the manner of many 
of the Fathers? and, how not a single discordant trait 
falling from their pen, spoils the perfect harmony of 
that inimitable character, or derogates from the ever 
amiable dignity of that sublime creation ? 

Once more, this unity, this purity, this perfection, 
comes not from man : it is from God ! and we ought 
to own that here, as well as elsewhere, it was necessary 
that the Holy Ghost should himself superintend all 
that is written by his historians, and make himself tl>e 
guarantee of their slightest expressions. 

6. But this is not all. See farther how, even with- 
out the knowledge of the authors, the histories in the 
Bible are full of the future. Even in relating the 
events of the past, " they are types," says Paul, '• for us 
upon whom the ends of the world are come."^ They 
relate, it is true, national scenes or domestic scenes ; 
but while they relate, Jesus Christ is incessantly and 
prophetically portrayed under all his aspects, and in 
all his characters. See the history of Adam, of Noah, 
of Abraham, of Isaac, of Joseph, of Moses, of the sa- 
crificial lamb, of the deliverance from Egypt, of the 
pillar of fire, of the manna, of the rock which was 
Christ (1 Cor. x. 4), of the goat Azazel, of all the sa- 
crifices, of Joshua, of David, of Solomon, of Jonah, of 
Zorobabel. One would need to write a commentary on 
the whole history, in order to do justice to this truth. 
Read over, in order that you may appreciate it, the 
pages of Paul on Agar, on Sarah, on Aaron, on Md- 
chisedec. 

If, then, one would reflect upon this, he would soon 
acknowledge, with wonder, the constant forth-putting 
of the power of inspiration in all parts of these Scrip- 
tures ; and one would feel assured, that if there be 
pages in the Bible that have need to be inspired iji 

' ] Cor. X. 6. 11. 



SPECIAL END OF SCRIPTURE HISTORY. 293 

every line and in every word, these are the historical 
books : they preach, they reveal, they set forth doctrine, 
they legislate, they prophesy. 

Compare them not, therefore, with other histories : 
they have quite another scope. 

They behoved to have this full inspiration, in order 
to recite, without any error, facts inaccessible to man's 
knowledge, the creation of the universe, the extrication 
of chaos, the birth of light, the rise of the mountains, 
the intervention of angels, God's secret counsels, the 
thoughts of man's heart and his secret faults ; but they 
specially behoved to have it in order that they might pre- 
figure Christ by a thousand types unperceived by the 
writer himself, and thus exhibit even in their nararives 
of the past, the character of the Messiah, his sufterings, 
his death, and the glories that were to follow. It was 
necessary for them, in order that they might speak in a 
suitable manner of those events even that were known to 
them, to pass some over in silence, to relate others, to 
characterize them, to judge them, and thus to show in 
them the thought of God ; but it was above all neces- 
sary for enabling them to describe in the just measure 
prescribed by that thought of God, and by the needs of 
the future Church, the scenes, whether national or do- 
mestic, which behoved to carry along with them the 
types of the work of redemption, to prefigure the last 
times, and to take in a vast sweep of thousands of years 
posterior to them. They required it for the purpose of de- 
termining the measure of what they might confide to their 
readers, and what they should withhold, for the discreet 
use of their expressions, and for that admirable restraint 
upon themselves which they have uniformly preserved. 

7. ^e could wish we had time to speak here of their 
dramatic power (if such an expression may be per- 
mitted), that di>-ine and indefinable charm, that mys- 
terious and ever- recurring attraction, which we find 
attached to all their narratives, which captivates man's 
soul under all climates, which makes us find in them, 
throughout all our lives, as in the scenes of nature, an 



294 ATTRACTIVENESS OF THE SCRTPTURRS. 

ever fresh charm; and after being delighted and moved 
by these incomparable narratives in our early childhood, 
affects our tender feelings even in hoary age. Certainly, 
there must needs be something superhuman in the very 
humanity of these forms, so familiar and so simple. — 
Men are incapable of telling a story thus. — Who shall 
tell us the secret of this attractiveness? In what does 
it consist ? We should find it not easy to say, perhaps : 
it seems to lie in an ineffable mixture of simplicity and 
depth, of the natural and the unlooked for, of local 
colouring and spirituality ; it further lies in this, that 
the narratives are marked by rapidity and simplicity, 
that they are at once minute in detail and concise; it 
lies, finally, in the harmony and the truth of the senti- 
ments ; it presents man, it presents nature, in their in- 
most reality. — In a word, you cannot fail to feel (even 
without being able to account for it) that He who speaks 
in this book, has immediately before him all the most 
hidden strings of man's heart, so as to be able to touch 
them at will, with a hand light or powerful, in the pre- 
cise measure that his Spirit has proposed to itself Read 
over the scenes in which Ruth and Boaz appear on the 
plains of Bethlehem, those where Abraham and Isaac 
meet on mount Moriah, those of David and Jonathan, 
those of Elijah and Elisha, those of Naaman the 
Syrian, of the widow of Zarephath, or of the Shuna- 
mite, and, al)ove all, those of the life and death of the 
Son of man ; and, after that, search every where else in 
the books of men, and see if you can find any thing 
similar. Read, if you like, the four Yedahs, and the 
voluminous collection of Pauthier, the sacred books of 
the East, Confucius, Manon, Mahomet;^ and see if there 
are to be met with there eight lines that can be com- 
pared to these incomparable narratives of Scripture. — 
But that we dreaded enlarging too fiir, we could have 

' Les TJvre^i sacresde VOnent, comprenaiit le Chouking, ou LitTt 
par excellence Ic Sse Chou, ou les Quatre livres 7)wrauj: de Coufuciut 
et de scs disci}) les; les Lois de Manon, premier legislateur lie I'lnde; 
le Koran de Mahomet, par Pauthier, Paris 1840. 



DUPLESSIS MORNAY ON THE SCRIPTURES. 205 

wished to make some comparisons here, and to take in 
turns the relations of the same facts in the Old Testa- 
ment and in the Koran, in the New Testament and in 
the spurious Gospels, in the patriarchal scenes of Ge- 
nesis, and in what has been made of them by men 
every time they have related them. Read over, for 
instance, in Moses, the life of Joseph, his infancy, his 
misfortunes, his temptations, and as far as that inimi- 
table scene in which Jacob's eleven sons appear before 
their brother ; as far as that " God he gracious unto thee^ 
my son !" (xliii. 29), and as far as " I am Joseph (•^3S 
vpr') !" which at no time of life can one peruse without 
fresh emotion ; and, then, go and take up that history 
again in Mahomet ; go read his xii. chapter, in titled 
Joseph^ written at ]\Iecca in a hundred and eleven 
verses, and beginning with these words : " \Ye have 
made this book come down from heaven in the Arabic 
tongue, in order that people may understand it, and 
we proceed to relate the most beautiful story that we 
have revealed to thee in this Koran," 

" Let, then," says the celebrated Duplessis Mornay,^ 
" the hardest hearts, and the most squeamish palates in 
the world, come and read over these histories of our 
Bible ; . . . . they will feel their whole bodies thrill, 
their hearts move, and a tenderness of affection come 
over them in a moment, more than had all the orators 
of Greece and Rome preached to them the same matters 
for whole days. Let them go and read the same his- 
tories in Flaviirs Josephus, to whom the emperor Titus 
ordered a statue to be erected on account of the ele- 
gance of his history, he will leave them colder and less 
moved than he found them. What, then, if this Scrip- 
ture has in its humility more elevation, in its simplicity 
more depth, in its absence of all effort more charms, in 
its grossness more vigour and point, than we know 
to find any where else of these qualities ? " 

Oh no ! we must say of the historical Scriptures, 

1 De la Verite de la Religion Chretienue, pp. 613, 614. 

27 



296 DIVINE BREVITY OF THE SCRIPTURES. 

even in this respect, that never have men related events 
as they have done, neither before nor after. 

8. People have not perhaps sufficiently remarked, 
they have not sufficiently admired their divine brevity. 
If you would, in this respect, appreciate the Scriptures, 
compare them with the biographies that men have 
written, or with the systems of doctrine which they have 
given, when left to do so. See, for example, the 
modern Church of the Jews, and see that of the Latins. 
While the former has joined to the Scripture its two 
Talmuds, by attributing to them the same authority, one 
of which (that of Jerusalem) forms a large folio volume ; 
and the other (that of Babylon), which is most followed, 
and which must be studied by all its doctors, is a work 
of twelve folio volumes ;^ and while the Roman Church 
in its Council of Trent declares, '" that it receives, with 
the same affection and reverence as the Holy Scripture, 
its traditions respecting faith and morals ;" that is to 
say, the vast repertory of its synodal acts, of its decretals, 
of its bulls, of its canons, and of the writings of the holy 
fathers ;^ behold what the Spirit hath done in the Bible, 
and there admire the celestial prudence of its inimitable 
brevity. 

Who among us could have been, for three years and 
a half, the constant witness, the passionately attached 
friend, of a man like Jesus Christ, and could have been 
able to write in sixteen or seventeen short chapters, or 
in eight hundred lines, the history of the whole of that 
life — of his birth, of his ministry, of his miracles, of his 
preachings, of his sufferings, of his death, of his resur- 
rection, and of his ascension into the heavens? Who 
among us would have found it possible to avoid saying 
a word of the first thirty years of such a life ? Who 
among us could have related so many acts of kindness 

> La derniere edition d' Amsterdam. Maimonides has made a 
learned extntct from it in his Vad Hachazakah. See Prideau, Ilis- 
taire des Juifs, Amsteniam, vol. ii. p. 130. 

2 C'mcile de Trent, sess. 4, Ist and *2d decrees, published '28th 
Apr. 1546. Bellarmin. de Verl)o Dei, lib. iv. cap. 3, 5, 6. Coton, 
lib. ii. cap. 24, 34, 35. Baile Trait 6 i. du Perron contre Tilenus. 



DIVINE RESERVE OF THE SCRIPTURES, 297 

without an exclamation ; so many miracles without re • 
jflections on them ; so many sublime thoughts without 
any emphasis; so many sufferings without complaint; 
&o many acts of injustice without bitterness ; so many 
sinless infirmities in their Master, and so many sinful 
infirmities in his disciples, without any suppression ; so 
much ingratitude in their cowardly abandonment of 
him ; so many instances of resistance, so much igno- 
rance, so much hardness of heart, without the slightest 
excuse or comment? Is it thus that man relates a 
history? Who among us, further, could have known 
how to distinguish what behoved to be said cursorily 
from Avhat required to be told in detail ? Who among 
us, for example, could have thought that the whole 
creation of the world behoved to be related in a chapter 
of thirty-one verses ; then the probation, the fall, anc' 
the condemnation of our race, in another chapter of 
twenty-four verses ; while he consecrated so very many 
chapters and pages to the construction of the tabernacle 
and of its utensils, because these presented to future 
ages a continual and typical view of Jesus Christ and 
of his redemption ? Who among us, for the same rea- 
son, would have devoted the fifth part of the book of 
Genesis to relating the history of one alone of the twelve 
children of Jacob, while two chapters only had seemed to 
suffice for seventeen hundred years of the history of the 
human race, from Adam's fall to the deluge ? Who 
among us would have thought, like Matthew, of men- 
tioning only four women (and such women !) in the 
forty-two generations of the ancestors of Jesus Christ, 
and of their recording there the names of the incestuous 
Tamar, the impure Kahab, Ruth the Moabitess, and the 
adulterous spouse of Uriah, without tempering the 
scandal by a single reflection ? Who among us Avould 
have consecrated but a single verse to the conversion of 
a Roman proconsul (Acts xiii. 12)? Who among us, 
after having shared, during ten years, in the labours 
of Paul, his perils, his imprisonments, his preachings, 
and bis prophetical gifts, could have related twenty-two 



298 DIVINE BREVITY OF THE ACTS 

years of such a life without saying a word about him- 
self, and without making known, except by the mere 
change of the personal pronoun (at chap. xvi. ver. 10), 
that from Troas to Jerusalem and Cesarea, and from 
Jerusalem and Cesarea to Malta and thence to Rome, 
he had been his suifering, faithful, indefatigable com- 
panion ? It is necessary, in order to our being 
aware of this, that it should be Paul himself who, 
during his last imprisonment, should WTite to Timothy : 
" At my first answer no man stood with me, but all 
men forsook me; Luke only is with me." — (2 Tim. 
iv. 16,11; Philem. 24; Coloss. iv. 14.) Holy and hea- 
venly reserve, humble and noble silence, such as the 
Holy Ghost alone could have taught ! 

Where ^vill you find, among all uninspired narrators, 
a man who could have written, like Luke, the Acts 
of the Apostles ? Who could have contrived to relate 
within thirty pages the church history of tlie thirty 
noblest years of Christianity — from the ascension of tlie 
Son of man above the clouds of heaven, to the impri- 
sonment of St Paul in the capital of the Roman world ? 
Incomparable history ! k>ee, at once, how short if is, 
and yet how full ! What do we not find in it ? Ad- 
dresses delivered to the Jews, to the Greeks, before the 
tribunals, before the Areopagus, and before the Sanhe- 
drim, in places of public resort and before a proconsul, 
in synagogues and before kings ; admirable descriptions 
of the primitive Church ; miraculous and dramatic 
scenes witnessed in the midst of her ; the interventions 
of angels, to deliver, to warn, or to punish ; controver- 
sies and divisions in Christian congregations ; new in- 
stitutions in the Church ; the history of a first council 
and its synodic epistje; commentaries on the Scripture; 
accounts of heresy; judgments from God, solemn and 
terrible ; appearances of the Lord in the highway, in 
the tenplo, and in prison; details of conversions, often 
miraculous and singularly varied — that of Kneas, that 
of the eunuch, that of Cornelius the centurion, that of 
the Roman jailer, that of the proconsul, that of Lydia, 



OF THE APOSTLKS. 290 

that of Apollos, that of a numerous body at Jerusalem 
— not to mention such as were only commenced, as in 
the emotion felt by king Agrippa, in the troubled state 
of Felix's mind, in the kind acts of the centurion 
Julius; missionary excursions; different solutions of 
sundry cases of conscience; permanent divisions with 
respect to external matters among different classes of 
Christians; mutual prejudices; disputes among the 
brethren and among the apostles ; warm expressions, 
explanations, and yet triumphs of the spirit of charity 
over these obstacles ; communications from one mili- 
tary officer to another, from one proconsul to another ; 
resurrections from the dead ; revelations made to the 
Church, in order to hasten the calling of the Gentiles ; 
collections for the poor by one Church for another; 
prophecies; national scenes; punishments consummated 
or prepared ; appearances before Jewish tribunals or 
Roman municipalities, before governors and kings ; 
meetings of Christians from house to house; their emo- 
tions, their prayers, their charity, their doubts ; a per- 
secuting king struck by an angel and eaten by worms, 
just as when, in order to gratify the populace, he had 
actually slain one apostle and was meditating the death 
of another; persecutions under every form — by syna- 
gogues, by princes, by municipalities, by the Jews, or 
by popular tumults; deliverances experienced by men 
of God, through the instrumentality sometimes of a 
child, sometimes of an angel, sometimes of a Roman 
tribune or ship-captain, of pagan magistrates or idola- 
trous soldiers; storms and shipwrecks described with a 
nautical exactness of detail which, as we ourselves have 
witnessed, continues to charm the sailors of our own day; 
— and all this in thirty pages, or twenty- eight short chap- 
ters. Admirable brevity! Was God's Holy Spirit not 
necessary for this conciseness, for this choice of details, 
for this manner at once pious, varied, brief, richly sig- 
nificative, so sparing in the employment of words, and 
yet teaching so many things ? — Fulness, conciseness, 
clearness, unction, simplicity, elevation, practical rich- 



300 CHOICE OF DETAILS. 

ness ; such is the hook of Church history that was 
needed for God's people. True ; but, once more, it is 
not thus that men compose histories. 

Could you find upon the earth a man capable of re- 
lating the murder of his mother with the calmness, the 
moderation, the sobriety, the apparent impassibility of 
that quadruple narrative of the evangelists, telling of 
the crucifixion of Jesus, of that Jesus whom they loved 
more than one loves his mother, more than one loves 
his life? of that Jesus whom they had seen on his 
knees in Gethsemane; then betrayed, forsaken, dragged 
with his hands bound to Jerusalem, and finally nailed 
naked to a cross, while the sun hid his light, and the 
earth quaked and opened, and when He who had 
raised the dead to life again, was himself reduced to 
the state of the dead ! Was not God's Spirit then re- 
quired at every line, at every word of such a narrative, 
in order to make a suitable choice of details, amid an 
age and a world of recollections ? 

9. There was a necessity, moreover, for an entire 
guidance by the Holy Ghost, in order to the main- 
tenance of that prophetical reserve which the sacred 
historians were enabled in so many respects to observe; 
and of that altogether divine prudence, which reveals 
itself not only in what they teach, but also in what 
they withhold ; not only in the terms which they era- 
ploy, but also in those they avoid. 

And here, to enable one to form some estimate of this, 
observe them, for example, when they speak of the 
mother of Jesus. What divine foresight, and what 
prophetical wisdom, both in their narratives and in their 
expressions ! How readily might they have been led, 
in their ardent adoration of the Son, to express them- 
selves, when speaking of the mother, in tenns of too 
much respect ! Would not a single word, suffered to 
escape from the want of circumspection so natural to 
their first emotions, have for ever sanctioned the idola- 
tries of future ages towards JMary, and the crime of the 
worship which is paid to her ? But they have never 



DIVINE FORESIGHT. 301 

allowed themselves to drop any such word. Had they 
so much as merely called her the mother of God ? No, 
not even that ; although he was in their eyes Emmanuel, 
the God-jMan, the Word which was in the beginning, 
which was with God, which was God, and which was 
made flesh. Listen to them. What do we find them say of 
her after the death and the resurrection of their Saviour? 
One single sentence, after which they say not a word 
more about her. " These all continued with one accord 
in prayer and supplication, with the women and Mary 
the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren." (Actsi. 14.) 
(" Hi omnes er ant per sever antes unanimiter in oratione 
cum mulieribus, et Maria et matreJesu et fratrihus ejus.") 
Here they name her neither first nor last ; here she ap- 
pears, as the mother of Jesus, among the brethren of 
Jesus, and the women of Galilee. And what do we 
find them say of her before the Lord's death ? Note 
this carefully. Ah, it is not thus that men relate events ! 
Of all that Jesus Christ may have said to his mother 
after the opening of his mission, they have selected but 
three sayings to be handed down to us. The first is as 
follows : " Woman (when she interfered with his com- 
mencing ministry, and asked of him a miracle), woman 
(woman!) what have I to do with thee?"^ Then, 
when a woman from among the people, in the warmth 
of her enthusiasm, cried out from amid the crowd : 
" Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps 
which thou hast sucked ! " " Yea, rather, blessed are 
they that hear the word of God and keep it !" ^ Such 
is the second. Hear now the third : His mother and 
his brethren were shaken in their faith, and some of them 
had been heard to say, " He is beside himself {dicebant 
e'/iim^ quoniam in furorem versus est); and one said 
imto him, ' Behold thy mother and thy brethren stand 
without desiring to speak with thee.' " " Who is my 
mother ? " was his reply ; and stretching forth his hand 
towards his disciples he said : " Behold my mother . . . 

» John ii. 4. a Luke xi. 27, 28. 



302 DIVINE WISDOM OP THE SCRIPTURES. 

every woman that shall do the will of my Father which 
is in heaven, the same is my mother." '-'•Ecce mater 
mea." And when, in his last agony, he beholds her 
from the cross, he no longer calls her by the name of 
mother ; but he bequeaths her to the disciple whom he 
loved, saying, " Woman, behold thy son ; John, behold 
thy mother ;" and from that hour that disciple took her 
to his own home, not to worship her but to protect her, 
as a w^eak and suffering creature whose soul had been 
pierced through with a sword. 

Is it thus, then, we again ask, that men relate events, 
and must not the prophetic Spirit alone have been the 
relater of these facts ? 

We could wish to give other examples : they at this 
moment crowd upon our mind, and it costs us a sacrifice 
to omit mentioning them ; for the more narrowly we 
study these historical books, the more does the prophe- 
tical wisdom of God's Spirit who dictated them reveal 
itself there in details, at first sight far from obvious. 
We could wish to point out among others the altogether 
prophetic wisdom with which the Holy Spirit often, on 
coming to relate some one important fact more than 
once, is careful to vary his expressions, in order to pre- 
vent the false interpretations that might be put upon it, 
and to condemn beforehand the errors which were in a 
distant future to be attached to it. We would cite, for 
example, the manner, so remarkable and so unexpected, 
in which the tenth law of the Decalogue is repeated in 
Deuteronomy,^ with a remarkable transposition of its 
first terms ; the Holy Ghost thus desiring to confound 
prophetically the artifice whereby the doctors of Rome 
were to endeavour, fifteen centuries afterwards, to di- 
vide that commandment into two, in order to veil over 
the criminal omission they have dared to make of the 
second : " And thou shalt not make unto thyself any 
graven image, nor any likeness . . . thou shalt not bow 
down to them, nor serve them." We could wish to 

» Deut. V. 21 ; Exod. xx. 17. 



THE DECALOGUE AND THE SUPPER. 303 

point farther to the variety of expression ^Yith which the 
Holy Ghost has related to us the divine institution of 
the holy Supper, and has paraphrased it several times^ 
for the purpose of enabling us better to comprehend what 
was the meaning of Jesus Christ, and to condemn before- 
hand the carnal sense which people were to give to these 
words : " This is my blood ; this cup is the New 
Testament in my blood," he also said : " This cup is 
the COMMUNICATION of the blood of the New Testament." 
We would desire to call attention to the prophetic 
wisdom with which the Holy Ghost, in order to con- 
found those who in the sequel were to allege that Judas 
did not participate in the last Supper, and that he went 
out before, or did not come in till after it, has taken 
care to let us know, by Mark and Matthew,^ that Jesus 
gave notice of the treachery of Judas before the com- 
munion, Judas being present; and by Luke, that he 
gave notice of it also afterwards, Judas being present.^ 
"We could wish to show in the case of all the New Tes- 
tament writers, the constant sobriety of their words, 
when the subject in hand bears on the relations of 
pastors to the churches ; and that admirable prudence 
with which they have always abstained from applying, 
even in a single instance, to the ministers of the Chris- 
tian Church, the name sacerdotes, or sacrificers ; reserv- 
ing to them that title of elders or presbyters which 
was given to laymen in Israel, and distinguishing them 
always from the sacerdotal race (which represented 
Jesus Christ, and which behoved to cease when the sole 
true priest had appeared). We could wish to point 
out, also, that prudence with which never do we find a 
soul conducted to any other pastor^ any other director 
(^%a&riy7iTr,gf than Jesus Christ, and with which, in 
recommending deference towards spiritual guides, the 
Scripture is careful to name them always in the plural, 
in order that none might ever have its authority to ap- 
peal to in support of that idea, so natural to pastors and 

J Matt. xxvi. 21-25; Mark xiv. 18-20. " Luke xxii. 19-23. 

8 Matt, xxiii. 8-10. 



304 JESUS CHRIST OUR ONLY DIRECTOR. 

to the members of flocks, that every soul ought to have 
its pastor among men. "Call no man on earth j^our 
father; and do not make yourself be called Director, 
for Christ alone is your director." What precaution, 
what reserve in the narratives, in order that loo much 
might never be attributed to man, and to recount " the 
great things that God did by means of the apostles," ^ in 
such a manner that self in all might be abased, that all 
glory might redound to God, and that all the Lord's 
servants may learn to say with the last prophet of the 
Old Testament and the first prophet of the New, " He 
must increase, and I must decrease." 

We repeat it, one must do violence to his own feel- 
ings, with the volume of the Bible before him, not to 
cite more such examples from it. 

From all these traits taken together, it behoves us 
then to conclude, that, though the whole Scripture is 
divinely inspired, the historical books, more than all the 
rest, make this divine intervention most manifest ; they 
show it to be most indispensable ; they attest, that for 
such pages it was necessary that the invisible and 
almighty hand of the Holy Ghost should be placed over 
that of the sacred \ATiter, and guide it from the first line 
to the last. Here something more was necessary 
than learned men, than saints, than enlightened 
minds, than angels or archangels — here God was ne- 
cessary. 

We will say, then, with Origen, that the sacred 
volumes breathe the plenitude of the Spirit, and that 
there is nothing either in Prophets, or in Law, or in Gos- 
pel, or in Apostle, which does not come down from the 
fulness of the majesty of God ; ^ and with St Ambrose, ^ 

1 Acts xiv. 27; 1 Cor. iii. 6. 

2 Ilomilia ii. m Jerem., cap. 1. 

8 " Utrumque poculum bibe Veteris et Novi Testamenti, quia ex 
utroque Christum bibis. Bibe Christum, ut bibas snnguinem quo 
rederaptus es : bibe Christum, ut biba8 sermones ejus. Bibitur 
Scriptura sacra, et devoratur Scrii)turu divina, cum in venas mentis 
ac vires animi 8UCCU8 verbi descendit etorni." {^Amhrosius in Psalm 
X. Enarratio. 



OPINIONS OP ST AMBROSE AND ST AUGUSTINE. 305 

— " drink both the cup of the Old and that of the New 
Testament, for, in both, it is Christ that thou drinkest. 
Drink Jesus Christ, that thou mayest drink the blood by 
which thou hast been redeemed. Drink Jesus Christ, 
in order that thou mayest drink in all his sayings. We 
drink holy Scripture, we devour holy Scripture, when 
the juice of the everlasting Word descends into the veins 
of our mind, and penetrates the energies of our soul." 
And with Augustine :^ "•'Wonderful are the depths of 
thine oracles ! Behold how their surface charms little 
ones ; but wonderful depth, O my God, what wonderful 
depth ! One shudders at the contemplation of it — a 
thrill of reverence and trembling of love ! " 

But, how now (it has been sometimes said further), 
must we believe that the letter of the Pagan Lysias,^ or 
the harangue of the Jew Gamaliel,^ or the discourses of 
Job's harsh friends, were all inspired ? No, without 
doubt. No more than those of Cain, or of Lamech, or 
of Rabshakeh, or of Satan. But the sacred writers 
were as really guided by God, in order that they might 
transmit them to us, as they were to tell us* the song of 
Mary in the hill country, or that of the seraphim in the 
year that king Uzziah died, or that of the celestial army 
at Bethlehem. The Holy Ghost is not always the 
author of the words which he reports, but he is always 
the historian. 

Meanwhile another evasion is made in order to except 
a part of the Scriptures from the Theopneustia. If 
this is not the most serious objection, it is, at least, one 
of those that are most frequently advanced. 

I Miraprofunditas eloquiorum tuorum, quorum ecce ante nos super- 
ficies blandiens parvulis; sed mira profunditas, Deus nieus, mira 
profunditas ! Horror est intendere in earn, horror honoris et tremoi 
amoris ! {Confess, lib. xii. cap. 14.) 

« Acta xxui. 25. » Acts v. 34. < Luke i 46. 



306 APPARENT INSIGNIFICANCE 



SECTION III. 

WILL THE APPARENT INSIGNIFICANCE OF CERTAIN DETAILS IN THB 
BIBLE AUTHORIZE THEIR BEING EXCEPTED FROM INSPIRATION ? 

"Was it suited to the dignity of inspiration to accom- 
pany the thoughts of the apostle Paul, even into those 
vulgar details to which we see him descend in many of 
his letters ? Could the Holy Ghost have gone so far as 
to dictate to him those ordinary salutations with which 
they close ? or those medicinal counsels which he gives 
to Timothy with respect to his stomach and his frequent 
infirmities ? or those commissions with which he charges 
him with respect to his parchments and a certain cloak 
which he had left with Carpus at Troas, when he quit- 
ted Asia?" 

We beg the reader will allow us to beseech him to 
ponder well, when, on taking the Bible into his hands, 
he does not perceive, from his very first readings, the 
tokens of God in such or such a passage of the Word. 
Let not those reckless hands proceed to cast a single 
verse out of the temple of the Scriptures. They clasp an 
eternal book, all the authors of which have said, like 
Paul, "And I think that I also have the mind of the 
Lord." If then he does not as yet see any thing divine 
in such or such a verse, the fault is in himselt, not in 
the passage. Let him say rather, like Jacob, '■'■ Surely 
the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not."^ 

Let us examine more closely the passages alleged. 

Paul, from the recess of his prison, asks for the re- 
turn of his cloak; he had left it with Carpus at Troas; 
he begs Timothy to hasten before winter, and not to for- 
get to bring it with him. This domestic detail, so miuiy 
thousand times adduced as an objection to the inspira- 
tion of the Scriptures, from the days of the Anonieaiis 

' Gen. x-x\iiL 16. 



OF CERTAIN SCRIPTURE DETAILS. 307 

spoken of by Jerome,^ this detail seems to you too 
trivial for an apostolical book, or, at least, too insignifi- 
cant, and too remote from edification, for the dignity of 
inspiration. Unhappy is the man, nevertheless, who 
does not perceive its pathetic grandeur ! 

Jesus Christ also, on the day of his death, spoke of 
his garment and his vesture. Would you have that 
passage dismissed from the number of inspired sayings ? 
It Avas after a niofht of fatigue and anguish. He had 
been led through the streets of Jerusalem for seven 
hours in succession, by torch-light, from street to street, 
from tribunal to tribunal, beaten and butfetted, blind- 
folded in mockery, and struck with sticks on the head. 
The morrow's sun had not risen when they bound his 
hands to lead him further from the sacerdotal palace to 
Pilate's pretorium. There, his flesh torn with stripes, 
bathed with blood, then delivered over in order to his 
final execution into the hands of ferocious soldiers, he 
saw all his clothes taken from him that he might be 
arrayed in a purple robe, while people knelt before him, 
and put a reed in his hand, and spit in his face. Then, 
before placing the cross on his torn limbs, his garments 
were thrown over his w^ounds, in order to his being 
taken to Calvary; but, when they were about to pro- 
ceed to his execution, they were taken from him for 
the third time ; and it was then that, spoiled of every 
thing, first of his upper garment, then of his very inner 
vesture, he was to die on the felon's gibbet, in view of 
an immense concourse of people. Was there ever found 
under heaven a man who has not found these details 
deeply moving, sublime, inimitable ? and was there 
ever found one who, from the recital of this death-scene, 
would think of retrenching, as useless or too common- 
place, the account given of those garments which Avere 
parted, and of that vesture on which a lot was cast ? 
Has not infidelity itself said, in speaking of it, that 
the majesty of the Scriptures astonished it, that their 

' See Proemium vn epist. ad Philem. 

28 



308 CASE OF ST PAUL. 



simplicity addressed itself to the heart, that the deatli o:' 
8ocrates was that of a eage, hut that the death, of Jesus 
Christ was that of a God V And if divine inspiiatio i 
was reserved for a portion only of the holy booV:=', 
vv^ould it not be for these very derails ? Would it not 
be for the history of that love which, after having lived 
upon the earth more poor than the birds of the air and 
the foxes of the field, desired to die poorer still, de- 
spoiled of every thing, of his upper and under garments, 
fixed to a felon's gibhet, with his arms extended and 
nailed to the tree ? Ah ! let your mind be at ease 
with respect to the Holy Ghost ! He has not dero- 
gated from his dignity ; and very far from having 
thought that he descended too far in reporting these 
facts to the earth, he hastened to relate them ; and it 
was a thousand years beforehand, it was in the age of 
the war of Troy, that he sang them to the harp of 
David : " They pierced my hands and my feet (he said) ; 
they look and stare upon me; they part my garments 
among them, and cast lots upon my vesture ! "' 

Well then, this is the same Spirit who has desired 
to show to us Paul writing to Timothy and asking 
for his cloak. Mark what he says He, too, was spoiled 
of every thing. Even while as yet but a youth, he was 
great among men, a favourite of princes, admired by 
all : he forsook all for Jesus Christ. For thirty years 
and more he has been poor; in labours more abundant 
than others, in stripes above measure, in prisons more 
frequent; of the Jews five times received he forty 
stripes save one; thrice was he heaten with rods; once 
was he stoned ; thrice he sutfered shipwreck ; in jour- 
neyings often, in perils of waters, in perils in the city, 
in perils in the wilderness, in perils on the sea; in 
watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in cold and 
nakedness (we quote his own words. )^ Mark now 
what he says : behold him advanced in years; he is in 
his last prison; he is in Rome; he is waiting for his 

» Rousseau's Emile. « Ps. xxii. 16-18; John xix. 23, 24. 

8 2 Cor. xi. 23-27. 



THE CLOAK HE LEFT AT TROAS. 309 

sentence of death; he has fought the good figlit; he 
has finished his course; he has kept the faith; but he 
is shivering with cold ; .... winter has commenced; 
and he is in want of clothes ! Buried in one of the 
dungeons of the Mamertine prisons, he lies under such 
a load of opprobrium that even all the Christians of 
Rome are ashamed of him, and when first called to 
appear before his judges, no man stood by hira. The 
time was, ten years before, when already a prisoner in 
Rome, and loaded with chains, he had at least re- 
ceived some money from the Philippians, who, know- 
ing his wretched state, had subscribed among them- 
selves in their indigence somethino^ to be sent as alms 
to him there; but now behold him forsaken; nobody 
was with hira but Luke; all had abandoned him; win- 
ter was at hand. He needed a cloak; he had left his 
two hundred leagues off, with Carpus at Troas; in th« 
chilly dungeons of Rome there was nobody to lend 
him one : had he not joyfully parted with all for 
Jesus ?^ had he not counted all the world's glories as 
dung that he mig-ht win Christ ? and does he not will- 
ingly endure all things for the elect's sake?^ We 
were ourselves last year in Rome, in a hotel at the 
beginning of November, on a rainy day. With w^hat 
a lively feeling, under the chill impressions of the even- 
ing, did we represent to ourselves the holy apostle Paul 
in the subterranean prisons of the Capitol, dictating the 
last of his letters, expressing his regret at the want of 
his cloak, and begging Timothy to send it to him before 
winter ! 

Who is there now that would wish to retrench from 
the inspired epistles a trait so affecting and so pathetic ? 
Does not the Holy Ghost take you as it were into Paul's 
prison, there to have inst:\nt occular evidence of his af- 
fectionate self-renunciation and sublime poverty ; so as 
to make us see also, as with our own eyes, what was the 
depth of his love, sometime before, when it made him 

1 Phil. iii. 8. 2 2 Tim. ii. 10. 



10 ST PAUL IN PRISON 



write in his letter to the Philippians : *' I tell you, eren 
weeping, that there are many among you who mind only 
earthly things, and whose end is destruction !" Do you 
not seem to behold him in his prison, loaded with his 
chain, engaged in writing, and the tears dropping on his 
parchment ? And do you not seem also to behold that 
poor body of his, one day ill-clothed, suffering, and 
benumbed ; the next, beheaded and dragged into the 
Tiber, in expectation of " that day vvhen the earth will 
give up her dead, and the sea the dead that are in it, 
and when Christ shall change our vile body to be fa- 
shioned like unto his glorious body?" And if these 
details are beautiful, do you think they are not useful 
too ? And if useful for the man who reads them as a 
simple historical truth, what do they not become for him 
who believes in their inspiration, and who says to him- 
self: "0 my soul, these words are written by Paul; 
but it is thy God that addresses them to thee !" Who 
could tell the strength and the comfort which, by their 
very familiarness and their actuality, they may have car- 
ried into prisons and cottages ? Who could reckon up 
the poor men and the martyrs to whom such traits have 
imparted encouragement, example, and joy ? We recol- 
lect, in Switzerland, in our day, the pastor Juvet, who 
was refused a coverlet, twenty years ago, in the prisons 
of the Canton de Vaud. One may call to mind in the 
Universal Church that Jerome of Prague, who was shut 
up for three hundred and forty days in the prisons of 
Constance, in the bottom of a dark foetid tower, and 
never allowed to leave it except to appear before his 
murderers. No more has there been forgotten, among 
the English, holy Bishop Hooper, dragged from his 
damp, disgusting cellar, covered with wretchedly poor 
clothes and a borrowed cloak, as he proceeded to the 
stake, tottering on his staff, and bent double with rhea- 
rnatism. Venerable fathers, blessed martyrs, you 
would no doubt call to mind your brother Paul, shut 
up in the prisons of Rome, suffering from cold and 
nakedness, and asking for his cloak ! Ah ! unhappy he 



WRITING FOR JITS CLOAK. 311 

who feels not the sublime humanity, the tender gran- 
deur, the provident and divine sympathy, the depth 
and the charm of such a mode of instruction ! but more 
to be pitied still, perhaps, is he who declares it to be 
human, because he does not comprehend it ! Here we 
would quote the noble words of the venerable Haldane^ 
on this verse of Paul : — " Here, in his solemn fare- 
well address, of which the verse before us forms a part 
— the last of his writings, and which contains a passage 
of unrivalled grandeur — the apostle of the Gentiles is 
exhibi'.ed in a situation deeply calculated to affect us. 
We behold him standing upon the confines of the two 
worlds — in this world about to be beheaded, as guilty, 
by the Emperor of Rome — in the other world to be 
crowned, as righteous, by the King of kings — here de- 
serted by men, there to be welcomed by angels — here 
in want of a cloak to cover him, there to be clothed 
upon with his house from heaven." 

Ah ! rather than bring forward these passages in order 
to rob the Scriptures of their infallibility, one should, 
have owned in them that wisdom of God, which so 
often, by a single stroke, has contrived to give us in- 
structions for which, without that, long pages would 
have been necessary. One should have adored that 
tender condescension which, stooping to our feeble- 
ness, has been pleased not only to reveal to us the 
loftiest conceptions of heaven in the simplest words of 
earth, but also to present them to us in forms so lively, 
so dramatic, so penetrating, by often concentrating them, 
so as to enable us the better to seize them, in the narrow 
compass of a single verse. 

It is thus, then, that St Paul, by these words thrown 

1 The Verbal Inspiration of the Old and New Testament maintained 
and established, hy Robert Haldane.. Esq. Edinburgh 1830. We 
warmly recommend to our readers the book of a man whose memory 
ought to be dear to our churches, and whose short residence at 
Geneva bore so much fruit. We would also refer, on the same sub- 
ject, to a treatise by Mr Alexander Carson : The Theories of Inspi- 
ration, &c. &c. Dublin 1830. Both these works have been of much 
use to us. 



312 REVERENCE IN DEFENDING THE 

out at random, among the very last commissions of a 
familiar letter, darts for us a sudden liglit on his ministry, 
and discovers to us with a word the whole of the apostle's 
life, as a single flash of lightning, during night, illumi- 
nates in an instant all tlie summits of our Alps, and as 
some people reveal to you their whole soul by a look. 

How many striking instances of this might we cite ! 
They crowed upon us ; but we are obliged to restrain 
ourselves ; and it will behove us rather to keep to the 
precise passages which have been adduced as objections. 

Before proceeding farther, we must, however, frankly 
avow, that w^e are almost ashamed to defend under this 
form the Word of the Lord ; and for any such apology 
we experience, as it were, a disgust of conscience. Is 
it altogether becoming ? and can we engage in it with- 
out some irreverence ? We ought to look well at all 
times to the manner in which w^e defend the things of 
God, and see to it that we do not imitate the reckless- 
ness of Uzzah in putting forth his hand to the ark of 
God, and wishing to hold it, for the oxen stumbled. 
The anger of the Lord, w^e are told, was kindled against 
him for his error.^ 

If it be fully acknowledged, on both sides, that any 
w^ord is contained in the oracles of God, then why de- 
fend it .... as worthy of him, by man's reasonings ? 
You may do so, no doubt, before unbelievers, but with 
men who own the divinity of the Scriptures, is it not to 
commit an insult on that word — is it not to take up a 
false position, and to lay your hand on the ark, as 
Uzzah did ? Did this Word present itself to your eyes 
as a root out of a dry ground ; had it no form nor 
comeliness, and no beauty to make you desire it, still 
you ought to venerate it, and look for every thing for 
it from him who has given it. Does it not imply, then, 
our being wanting in respect for him when he speaks, 
when we would prove the respect that is due to him ? 
Should I not have been ashamed when shown my Sa- 

> 2 Sam. vi. 6, 7. 



INSPIRATION OF GOD S WORD. 313 

viour and my God rising from supper, taking a bason, 
laying aside Ills garments, girding himself Vf'ith a towel, 
and proceeding to wash his disciples' feet — should I not 
hare been ashamed to set myself to proA-^e that, in spite 
of all this, still he was Christ ! Ah, I should rather 
have wished to worship him more fervently than ever ! 
Well, then, the majesty of the Scriptures desires to 
stoop to us ! There do you not behold one who rises 
from the table, lays aside his garments, girds himself 
like a servant, and kneels before sinners, in order to 
wash their feet ? " If I wash thee not, thou hast no 
part with me ! " Is there not in that very humiliation, 
which reveals itself to us with such a charm, as it were 
the voice of the Word in his humiliation ? 

As for us, it strikes us that there is no arrogance to 
be compared with that of a man who, owning the Bible 
to be a book from God, then makes bold to sift with 
his hand the pure in it from what is impure, the in- 
spired from what is uninspired, God from man. This 
is to overturn all the foundations of the faith ; it amounts 
to placing it, no more in believing God, but in believing 
ourselves. It ought to be enough for us that a chapter 
or a word form part of the Scriptures, in order to our 
knowing it to be divinely good ; for God has pronounced 
upon it as he has upon the creation, " I beheld all that 
I had made, and behold all was good." We will never 
say then, I find this saying admirable, therefore it is 
from God ; and still less, I see no use in it, therefore it 
is from man. God preserve us from so doing ! But we 
say, it is in the Scriptures, therefore it is from God. 
It is from God, therefore it is useful, therefore it is wise, 
therefore it is admirable; and if I do not yet see it to be 
so, the fault lies only with myself. We hold there is an 
error in this protection which man's wisdom would 
accord to that of God ; we hold there is an outrage in- 
volved in that clumsy stamp with which it sets itself to 
legalize the holy Scriptures, and in that absurd signa- 
ture with which it dares to mark its pages. 

If, then, we still go on here with the work of showing 
27 



314 ST PAUL S ADVICE TO TIMOTHY 

how the divine wisdom shines out in some passages 
which people dare to consider human, it is not for the 
purpose of establishing their divine origin on the judg- 
ments of our better informed wisdom, or to procure a 
tardy respect for them from the mere fact of the beauty 
they disclose. Our respect goes before; it was founded 
on the passage being written in the " Oracles of God." 
Henceforth, before having seen, we have believed. We 
have no thought, therefore, but that of refuting the 
objection by some examples of its temerity. Let us 
listen, further, to two or three passages to which people 
have made bold to refuse the honours of inspiration, be- 
cause they have started with the idea that they are 
Avithout any spiritual bearing. We will quote but a 
very small number here. It takes no time to pronounce 
of a sentence that it is useless or vulgar — to demonstrate 
that there is a mistake in the objection, requires pages. 

One of the passages which we have most frequently 
heard adduced, when people have wished to justify the 
distinction between what is inspired in the Word of 
God, and Avhat is not, is Paul's recommendation to 
Timothy with regard to the stomach complaints and 
ailings with which that young disciple Avas afflicted. 
" Drink no longer water, but use a little wine, for thy 
stomach's sake and frequent infirmities.'*-^ 

Nevertheless examine this passage more closely; what 
an admirable and living revelation do we find in it of 
the grandeur of the apostolic calling, and of the amia- 
bility of the Christian character! IMark, first, that it was 
as it were in the temple of God that it was pronounced ; 
for immediately before you hear those solemn words : — 
*' I cliarge thee before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, 
and the eh^ct angels, that thou observe these things, 
without preferring one before another, doing nothing 
by partiality. Lay hands suddenly on no man, keep 
thyself pure, drink no longer water." One sees that it 
is in the presence of their common Master, and of his 

i 1 Tim. V. 23. 



TOUCHING HIS HEALTH. 315 

holy angels, that Paul desired to speak to his disciple ; 
let us enter then into the same temple, in order to com- 
prehend him — let us place ourselves on the same 
heights, " before the Lord and his holy angels," then 
shall we speedily perceive how many beauties are re- 
vealed by these words, both in the ministry of the apos- 
tles, and in the ways of the Lord. This the celebrated 
Chrysostom well understood, when, preaching on those 
very words, he observed how little the Lord's most 
useful servants should be surprised, should it so happen 
that their Lord should deem it fit to prove them, as he 
did Timothy, with complaints in their chest, or head, 
or stomach — should he put some thorn in their flesh; 
and should he thus buffet them by some angel of Satan, 
in order to fashion them, on the one hand, for sympathy, 
for cordial affections, for tender compassions; and, on 
the other, for patience, self-denial, and, above all, for 
prayer. Read over seriously, and as if in the light of 
the last day, this beautiful passage of the apostle's ; ere 
long, within the small compass of this single verse, you 
will wonder how many precious lessons the Holy Ghost 
would give us, besides that pointed out by the pious 
bishop of Constantinople. How many words, and 
almost chapters, would have been required, in order 
that as much might be said to us under another form ! 
Here you will learn, for example, Timothy's sobriety; 
he had wished, like Paul, to bring his body under — 
he abstained entirely from wine. You will see here, in 
the third place, with what a tender and fatherly delicacy 
the apostle reproved him, either for his imprudence, or 
for austerity carried too far. You will remark here 
with what wisdom the Lord authorizes, and even bids, 
by these words, the men of God to pay the necessary 
attention to their health, at a time, nevertheless, in which 
he has thought fit to compromise it by sicknesses. In 
the fifth place, you will here admire the prophetic fore- 
cast with which these words, put in the mouth of an 
apostle, condemn beforehand those human traditions 
which were afterwards to interdict the use of wine to 



316 GREETINGS ADDRESSED bY ST PAUL 

believers as an impurity. Here j^ou will see, in the 
sixth place, with what tender solicitude, and with what 
fatherly watchfulness, tlie apostle, in the mids/ of his 
high functions, and notwithstanding the cares with 
which all the churches overwhelmed him (from Jeru- 
salem to lUyricum, and from Illyricum to Spain), di- 
rected his regards to the personal circumstances, to his 
health, to the weakness of his stomach, to his often 
infirmities, and to the imprudent habits of his daily re- 
gimen. You will further learn here an historical fact, 
which will throw an useful light for you on the nature 
of the miraculous gifts. Notwithstanding all the inte- 
rest felt by Paul in his disciple, he is incapable of 
re-establishing Timothy's health, even he who, however, 
had so often healed the sick, and even raised the dead 
to life again ; for the apostles (and we learn it again 
by this verse, as well as by the illness of Epaphroditus),^ 
did not receive the gift of miracles for a continuance, 
any more than that of inspiration ; it was a power that 
was renewed to them for every particular occasion. 

But if these numerous lessons from the apostle are 
important, and if we thus receive them all in a single 
verse, and in a way the best fitted to affect us, oh ! how 
penetrating do they not become to the Christian soul, 
from the moment he has the certain conviction that here 
we have not the words of a good man only ; that they 
are not even those of an apostle only ; })ut that it is the 
voice of his God who desires to teach him, under so af- 
fecting a form, sobriety, brotherly love, an affectionate 
interest for each other's health, the usefulness of infir- 
mities and afflictions even for God's most zealous servants, 
and who, in order to convey so many precious lessons to 
him, condescends to address him by the mouth of a 
siinple creature ! 

People, further, often object to us those greetings 
which close the epistles of Paul, and which, after all. 

> Phil. ii. 27. 



TO INDIVIDUAL SAINTS AT ROME. 31? 

we are told, are of no more importance than those ordi- 
nary compliments -with which •\ve all usually conclude 
our letters. Here there is nothing unworthy of an 
apostle, no doubt ; but no more is there any thing 
inspired. Here the Holy Ghost has allowed Paul's 
pen to run on, as we ourselves would allow a clerk to 
conclude by himself, in the usual form, a letter, the first 
pages of which we had dictated to him. Look, for ex- 
ample, at the last chapter of the epistle to the Romans. 
Is it not evident there, that the apostle surrenders him- 
self, in the course of sixteen verses, to the purely per- 
sonal reminiscences of his friendships ? Was there any 
need of inspiration for the dry nomenclature of all 
those persons? The apostle mentions eighteen by 
their names, without reckoning all to whom he sent 
remembrances collectively in the house oi ^Aquila, in 
that of Narcissus, or in that of Aristobulus. These 
verses require no inspiration ; and, what wouid have 
sufficed at most, in order to their being written, would 
have been such a superintendence on the part of the 
Holy Ghost, as that which he still exercised when he 
left them to their personality. 

"We are not afraid to avow that we delight to recall 
here these sixteen verses that have been so often objected 
to ; for, far from furnishing any ground for objection, 
they belong to the number of passages in which the divine 
wisdom recommends itself by itself; and, if you will 
examine more closely, you will, ere long, join us in 
admiring the fecundity, the condescension, and the ele- 
vation of this method of instruction ; you will find in 
it, under the most practical and the most artless form, a 
living picture of a primitive church ; and you will re- 
cognize in it to what an elevation, even the least known, 
and the most feeble among them, may rise in its bosom. 

Listen first, with what an affectionate interest the 
apostle recommends to the kind regard of tlie church 
of Rome that humble woman, who, it would appear, 
undertook the voyage from Corinth to Rome for the 
sake of his temporal affairs. She was a sister well be- 



318 LESSONS TO BE DERIVED 

loved, who had put herself at the service of the saints, 
and who had not been afraid to open her house to a 
great many of the believers, and to Paul himself, not- 
withstanding the perils of that hospitality. She was 
servant to the church of Cenchrea. It behoved the 
brethren who were settled at Rome, therefore, to receive 
her in the Lord, and to aid her in all her needs. Be- 
hold, then, what an example the apostle sets us, in some 
words, of that Christian urbanity which ought to cha- 
racterize all the mutual relations of God's children. 
Admire, as he passes so rapidly under review the 
brethren and the sisters of the church of Rome, the man- 
ner in which he contrives to pour even over this list of 
names which is called dry, the sweet unction of his 
charity. He has some words of encouragement and 
affectionate esteem for each of them ; he recalls in it the 
generous hospitality of Phebe, the risk of death which 
Aquila and his companion braved for him, the honour 
which Epenetus had of having been the first of the 
Achaians that were converted to Jesus Christ, the great 
labours of Andronicus and of Junia, who were even 
in the faith before him ; his Christian love for Amplias, 
the evangelical labours of Urbane, tlie proved fidelity 
of Apelles, the manifold labours of Tryphena and 
Tryphosa in the Lord, and those of the b( loved Persis. 
What an appeal, too, to the conscience of every serious 
reader is there in this rapid catalogue ! See, then, he 
ought to say to himself, who the faithful were to whom 
salutations were sent in the church of Rome ! And 
were the same apostle to write a letter to the church in 
which I myself occupy a place for some days, what 
would he say of me ? would my name be found in it ? 
could he add that, like Phebe, I receive the saints into 
my house ; that, like Aquila and Priscilla, I liold Chris- 
tian meetings under my happy roof; that, like Mary, I 
have bestowed much labour on the Lord's ministers ; 
that, like Andronicus and Junia, I had suffered for 
Jesus Ciirist ; that, like Rufus, I am chosen in the Lord ; 
that, like Urbane, I am his helper; that, like 'IVyphena, 



FROM THOSE GREETINGS. 319 

and Tryphosa, I labour in the Lord ; and that I even 
labour much, like the beloved Persis ? 

But behold, above all, what a lesson there is for 
Christian women in these admirable verses ! In the 
unaiFected familiarity which terminates this letter, what 
a lofty idea is given us of their vocation ! What an 
important part, then, is assigned them in the church, 
and what a place in heaven ! Without having yet seen 
the city of Rome, Paul mentions there by their own 
names, no fewer than nine or ten women among his 
fellow-labourers. First we have, besides Phebe, that 
admirable Priscilla, who had even exposed herself to 
death for the apostle, and towards whom all the 
churches of the Gentiles felt so much gratitude. Then 
we have a lady, called Mary, Avho had, he says, be- 
stowed much labour on the apostles; there was Try- 
phena; there was Tryphosa, who laboured also in the 
Lord; there was Persis, who was particularly dear to 
him, and who had laboured much in the Lord; there 
Avas Julia; there was the sister of Nereus; there was 
Olympia, perhaps;^ there was, in fine, the venerable 
mother of Rufus. And observe, in passing, with what 
respect he has named this lady, and with what delicacy 
he proceeds to salute her with the tender name of 
mother. Have we not here the very Christian polite- 
ness which he recommends to these same Romans in 
the 12th chapter of this epistle : " Salute Rufus, chosen 
in the Lord," he writes, " and his mother, who is 
ALSO mine!"^ What an afi"ecting pattern do not these 
verses propose to husbands and wives, in the persons of 
Aquila and of Priscilla ! You see them here in Rome ; 
you may have seen them, five years before, banished 
from Italy by the Emperor Claudius, arriving at 
Corinth, and receiving in their house the apostle 
Paul ; then, eighteen months afterwards, setting off 
with him to Asia, and staying at Ephesus, where they 

1 Or Olympias. This name might have been that of a -woman; 
but it is probably that of a man. 
« Rom. xvi. 13. 
29 



320 CHRISTIAN SOCIETY OF ROME. 

already had a church in their house,^ and where they 
received with so much success the young and brilliant 
Apollos, who, notwithstanding his talents, thought 
himself fortunate in having it in his power to put him- 
self to the school of their Christian conversation and 
their charity. Now that Claudius had died, so as to 
make way for Nero, you see them, when hardly re- 
turned to Rome, immediately consecrate their new 
residence to the church of God. It is in their house 
that it meets; and you learn here, further, as it were 
in passing, that these spouses had not hesitated to lay 
down their lives for the life of Paul. 

But, besides all these lessons, which, in these sixteen 
short verses, are offered to our consciences, you may 
there learn further two facts of deep importance for 
the history of the church. And, first, you see there, 
with the most unsought and the fullest evidence, that 
at that time there was no question in Rome about 
Peter, or his episcopate, or about his popedom, or his 
primacy, or even his presence. Do you not perceive a 
prophetical foresight in the care taken by the Holy 
Ghost to do, for this epistle to the Romans, what he 
has not done for any other of the fourteen of Paul's 
epistles, and to close it thus with a long catalogue of 
the women and of men that were the most esteemed at 
the time in the whole Roman church ? Behold, then, 
the apostle of the Gentiles, who, twenty years after his 
conversion, writes to them with greetings addressed to 
as many as twenty-eight persons living in the midst of 
them, by their proper names, and many others besides by 
collective designations, and who has not a word to send 
them for the prince of the apostles, as he is called, for 
the vicar of Jesus Christ, for his superior, for the bishop 
of the universal church, for the founder of the Roman 
church ! ! Peter was tlie apostle of the Circum- 
cision, and not of the Gentih's;'' his place was at 
Jerusalem ; there we Lave to look for him, and there 

1 1 Cor. i?i. 19. » Gal. ii. 7, 8, 9. 



IMPORTANT INFERENCES. 321 

Paul had always found him. In his first journey, 
three years after his conversation, Paul visited him and 
ahode fifteen days in his house.^ In his second journey, 
to go to the first council, he again meets him there. In 
his third journey, in the year 44, at the time of the 
death of Herod Agrippa, again it is there that Peter 
has his residence.^ In his fourth journey, seventeen 
years after his conversion,^ Paul finds him still there, 
in the charge of an apostle, not of the Gentiles (mark this 
well) but of the Circumcision. And when at last he 
was on the way accomplishing his fifth and last journey, 
he writes to the Romans and the Galatians; and then 
in order that the whole Church might know well that 
Peter is not at Rome, and never was there, we find 
Paul taking care to salute by their names all the most 
eminent among the believers at Rome, even among 
the women. What bishop in our days, of the Latin 
sect, would dare to write a letter of sixteen chapters to 
the church of Rome, without saying to it a single word 
either about its pope, or about Peter, or about a vicar 
of Jesus Christ ?* 

But there is another historical fact, still more in- 
teresting, to the knowledge of which these very sixteen 
verses, said to be useless, conduct us by the most 
striking traits. See, in the very details of these short 
salutations, by what humble instruments, and yet how 
extensively, the gospel had established itself in so short 
a time, in the mighty city of Rome. No apostle had 
set his foot there,^ yet behold with wonder what por- 
gress had already been made by the Word of God, solely 
through the labours of artizans, merchants, women, slaves, 
and freedmen, who happened to be in Rome! Jesus 
Christ had his disciples there, even in the palaces of the 
Jewish princes who resided at the imperial court, and 
even among the pagans who served nearer the person of 

» Gal. i. 18. 2 Acts xii. 1, 3. 3 Gal. ii. 7. 

* See on this subject the excellent dissertation of Pastor Boat : 
" Du pouvoir de. St Pierre dans VEglise. Geneva 1833." 
"Rom. i. 11,13, 14, 15; XV. 22. 



322 FIRST VERSES, THEN BOOKS IMPUGNED. 

Nero. Paul asks that salutations should be seut from 
him, first (among other Christians) to those of Aris- 
tobulus' household ; and, secondly, to those of the 
household of Narcissus " who are in the Lord." Now, 
the former of these two great personages was the brother 
of Agrippa the Great and of Herodias ; the second was 
the all-powerful favourite of the emperor Claudius. 
Agrippina caused him to be put to death only at the 
close of the year 54. 

Ah ! let all who call themselves Christians renounce 
then, and for ever, those rash systems in which people 
rise against the words of the Scriptures, to impugn their 
propriety ; in which people take away from God's Bible 
such and such a passage, and such and such a word, in 
order to make (at least as respects that passage and that 
word) a Bible of man's ; and in which people thus 
charge themselves with the responsibility of the temer- 
ities that shall be ventured upon besides, by doctors of 
greater hardihood, imitating upon a book what they 
shall have seen you do upon a verse ! What idea can 
a man have of the sacred writers, when he would im- 
pute to them the mad audacity of mingling their own 
oracles with those of the Most High ? We recollect the 
case of a man who had lost his reason, who was supported 
by our hospitals, whose handwriting, however, as a 
copyist, was so beautiful that one of the Geneva minis- 
ters engaged him to transcribe his sermons. Great was 
the confusion of the latter, when on looking at his papers 
again, he ascertained that the unhappy man had thought 
it his duty to enrich all the pages with his own thoughts. 
The distance is less, however, between a lunatic and a 
minister, even were he holy as Daniel and sublime as 
Isaiah, than between Daniel and Isaiah and the Eternal 
Wisdom ! 

Now, then, having advanced thus far, we would wish, 
before proceeding farther, to recommend to our readers, 
in the practice of sacred criticism, three precautions, the 
importance and necessity of whicli ought to be impressed 
upon them by the thcopueustic doctrine. 



SACRED CRITICISM AND ITS BEARINGS. 323 



CHAPTER VI. 

Oir fAORED CRITICISM, IN THE RELATIONS IT BEARS TO DIVINE 

INSPIRATION. 

Here we must not be misunderstood. Far from us be 
the idea of attaching the smallest disfavour to works of 
sacred criticism ! These, on the contrary, we honour ; 
we pronounce them necessary ; we study them ; we 
consider all ministers of the gospel bound to know 
them, and that the Christian church is bound to be 
warmly grateful to them. That is indeed a noble 
science ! It is so because of its object ; to study the 
destinies of the divine text, its canon, its manuscripts, 
its versions, its witnesses, and the innumerable authors 
who have quoted it ! .... it is so because of the 
services it has rendered : how many triumphs achieved 
over infidelity, how many objections silenced, how many 

mischievous doubts for ever dissipated ! it is so by 

its history : how many eminent men have consecrated 
to it either the devotedness of a pious life, or the might 
of the finest genius ! . . .. it is so, in fine, by its immense 
results, of which no one, perhaps, will ever know the 
measure if he has not studied it. 

May God preserve us, then, from setting faith here 
against science ; faith which lives on the truth against 
science which studies it ! faith which goes and lays hold 
of it in the hand of its God, against science which seeks 
it elsewhere more indirectly, and which often finds it ! 
All that is true in one place, is in pre-established har- 
mony with all that is true in another more elevated 
place. Faith knows, then, from the first, and before 



324 SACRED CRITICISM A SCIENTIFIC 

having seen any thing, that all truth will render testi- 
mony to it. All true science, be it what it may, is its 
friend ; but sacred criticism is more than its friend — it 
is almost of its kindred. Nevertheless it is all this only 
as long as it remains true, and as it keeps its own 
place. The moment it quits it, it must be kept down ; 
it then ceases to be a science ; it is but a silly piece of 
guesswork. Now, as there are three temptations to 
wander from it, we desire here to recommend three pre- 
cautions to young men studying it. 



SECTION I. 

SACRED CRITICISM IS A SCIENTIFIC INQUIRER, AND NOT A JUDGE. 

First of all, critical science does not keep its place 
when, instead of being a scientific inquirer, it would be 
a judge ; when, not content with collecting together 
the oracles of God, it sets about composing them, de- 
composing them, canonizing them, decanonizing them ; 
and, when it gives forth oracles itself! Then it tends 
to nothing less than to subvert the faith from its foun- 
dation. This we proceed to demonstrate. 

Employ your reason, your time, all the resources of 
your genius, to assure yourself whether the book which 
has been put into your hands, under the name of the 
Bible, contains, in fact, the same oracles, the first de- 
posit of which was confided, under the divine Provi- 
dence, to the Jewish people,^ and of which the second 
deposit, under the same guarantee, was committed to 
the church universal of the apostolic times. Assure 
yourself, then, if this book be authentic, and if the 
copyists have not altered it. All this labour is legiti- 
mate, rational, honourable ; it has been undertaken 
before you abundantly ; and if the investigations of 
another have not satisfied you, resume them, follow 

1 Rom. iii. 2. 



INQUIRER, NOT A JUDGF. 325 

them out, get all the information in your power ; all 
the churches of God will thank you. But when this 
work is over, when you have ascertained that the Bible 
is an authentic book, and that the unexceptionable 
seals of God Almighty are attached to it, then listen to 
what science and reason alike call to you ; then listen 
to God ; then sursum oculi, Jlexi popUtes^ sursum 
corda ! then down upon your knees ! lift up your 
hearts on high, in reverence, with profound humility ! 
Then science and reason have no longer to judge, but to 
receive ; no longer to pronounce, but to comprehend. 
There is still a task, and it is a science, if you will ; 
but it is no longer the same ; it is that of understand- 
ing and submission. 

But if your wisdom, on the contrary, after having 
received the Bible as an authentic book, makes bold to 
constitute itself the judge of what is found contained 
there ; if, from this Scripture, which calls itself inspired, 
and which declares that it is, at the last day, to judge 
you yourself, that wisdom of yours dares to take away 
any thing ; if, seating itself like the angels of the last 
judgment,^ it drag the book of God to the seashore of 
science, in order to collect in its vessels what it sees in 
it to be good, and to throw out what it firtds in it to be 
bad, if it pretend to separate there the thought of God 
from the thought of man ; if, for example (to adduce 
but one trait among a thousand) it venture to deny, 
like Michaelis, that the first two chapters of Matthew 
are from God, because it does not approve the Scriptu- 
ral quotations found in them ; next, to deny the inspi- 
ration of Mark and that of Luke, because it has found 
them, it says, in contradiction with Matthew ;^ in a 
word, if it think it has the power of subjecting the hook, 
acknowledged to be authentic, to the outrageous con- 
trol of its ignorance, and of its carnal sense ; then, it is 
necessary that it should be reproved ; it is guilty of 

1 Matt. xiii. 48, 49. 

2 Introduction to the New Testament, by Michaelis, vol, ii. p. i7; 
vol. 1. pp. 206, 214 (English translation.) 



326 THE EXAMPLE OF NATURALISTS 

revolt, it judges God. Here there is no longer science, 
there is fascination ; there is no longer progress, there 
is obscurantism. 

One may judge of this, if he compare with this blun- 
dering of theologians on the word of God, the more 
rational procedure of physicians and naturalists in 
studying his works. Here, at least, people hold before- 
hand as an axiom, that all objects in creation answer to 
ends that are full of wisdom and harmony. Here 
science sets itself, not to contest these ends, but to dis- 
cover them. Here, what people call progress, is not 
the daring rashness of controlling the works of their 
God ; it is the good fortune to have sounded them, to 
have obtained a better recognition of their marvels, and 
to have been able to present them under some new 
aspects to the admiration of men. 

Why, then, will Christians not do with the works of 
God in the works of redemption, what naturalists do with 
the works of God in creation ? Why, if, even among 
the pagans, a physician — the great Galen — could say 
"'•that in describing the different parts of the human 
body, he was composing a hymn in honour of Him who 
has made us," will not the Christian comprehend that to 
describe with truth the various parts of the Word of 
God, Avould be always " composing a hymn in honour 
of Him who has made it?" Thus thought the apos- 
tolic i'athers; thus the pious Irenreus, the disciple of 
Polycarp, the pupil of John. "The Scriptures are 
perfect," said he. " In the Scriptures let God always 
teach, and let man always learn ! Thus it is that from 
the con: used polyphony of their instructions, one sole 
and admirable ftymphony will make itself heard in us, 
praising by its hymns the God who has made all things."^ 

Were we to be told, there was a very studious na- 



• "Sic, per dictionum nniltas voces, una consonnns mrlodin in 
nobis S( titictur, lauiians liyimiis Diuni qui fecit oniiiin/' According 
to tlie (irccl . fis ])rcscrvc(l hy .John I);ii)iuscen»is : A<i rf j rit Xtixtn 
xoXti^etviots, iv Tti/x(fejvo¥ ttsAof £y fi/xtt aJoBrcnra.!. (Ailv. lliVifMS. lib. ii. 
C. 47.) 



REPROVES THEOLOGICAL ARROGANCE. 32? 

tion in existence, among whom the science of Nature, tak- 
ing a new direction, had begun immense works with the 
purpose of establishing that there are mistakes in crea- 
tion ; plants badly constructed, animals ill conceived, 
organs ill adapted — what would you think of such a 
people and their grand attempt ? Would you say that 
they effected any advance in science ? Would you not 
rather conceive that they darkened and degraded it, and 
that people there w^ere putting themselves to a deal of 
learned labour in finding out the art of being ignorant ? 
While anatomists have been unable to explain the use 
of the liver in the human body, or of antennae in that 
of insects, they have not on that account found nature 
in fault ; they have put it all to the account of their own 
ignorance. Why, then, when you happen not yet to 
have discovered the use of something that is said in the 
Scriptures, do you lay the blame on any but yourselves, 
and why will you not w^ait? 

This is no new idea. It is now sixteen hundred years 
since a godly man expressed it better than we have done, 
and preached it with unction to his contemporaries. " If 
ever, in reading Scriptures," says Origen, in the thirty- 
ninth of his homilies,^ '' you happen to stumble on some 
thought which becomes for thee a stone of stumbling 
and a rock of offence, blame none but thyself (a/V/w 
cauTov); doubt not that this stone of stumbling and' 
rock of offence has some great meaning Qyjiv vornj^cLroL)^ 
and is to fulfil that promise, ' He that believeth shall 
not be confounded." — (Rom. ix. 33.) Begin, then, with 
believing; and soon you will find, under this imaginary 
stumbling-block, a plentiful and holy utility? If we 
have received the commandment not to speak idle words, 
for we shall give account thereof at the last judgment, 
how much more ought we to think, with regard to God's 
prophets, that every word proceeding from their mouth 
had its object to effect and its utility ! ^ I believe, then, 
that for those who know how to make use of the virtue 

• Origenea adamantius, Horn, xxxix. iii Jerem. xliv. 22. 



328 ORIGEN S EXPOSTULATIONS. 

of the Scriptures, each of the letters written in the 
oracles of God, has its object and its use (hyd^irai), 
even to an iota and single jot. . . . And in like man- 
ner as among plants, there is not one which has not its 
virtue; and, nevertheless, it belongs only to those who 
have acquired a knowledge of botany to be able to tell 
us how each ought to be applied and prepared in order 
to its becoming useful; so likewise whoever h a holy 
and spiritual hotanist of the Word uf God (rig Boravr/iog 
s(fTjy ayiog xcci 'Trvsv/j.arixog), he, collecting each iota and 
each element, will find the virtue of that Word, and will 
perceive that nothing in that which rs written is super- 
fluous (6t/ oudsv Ta^sXxii). Would you have another 
comparison ? Every member of our body has its office for 
w^hich it has been placed there by the great Architect. 
Nevertheless, it belongs not to all to be acquainted with 
its use and virtue, but only to those physicians who 

have occupied themselves wdth anatomy Well, 

then, I consider the Scriptures as the collection of the 
plants of the Word, or as the perfect hody of the Word. 
But if thou art neither botanist of the Scriptures nor 
anatomist of the prophetical words, go not to imagine 
that there is any thing superfluous there; and when you 
have been unable to find the reason for that which is 
written, blame not the holy letters ; lay the blame on 
thyself alone." ^ Thus spake Origen ; but we might 
have found thoughts quite to the same efi"ect in other 
fathers, and particularly in Irenjeus,^ who lived still 
nearer the apostolic times. 

However, we must further bid the reader remark, 
that this pretending to judge the Word of God over- 
throws all the foundations of the fiiith. It avouM even 
render it impossible in the hearts of all who are but a little 
consistent. This it is but too easy to demonstrate. 

In order that a soul receive life, it must receive faith; 

• And he adds, T«ut« fx^i « t^m/ujov »7{»;t«/ xxOeXixHf x(*i*''f^> «7r«M 

/x>]$<v irocfxnfx.TKrOxi oom^lTXcrcv xcci txyt^i^ei/vtiroy y^ei/jL/jiM. 

' Irenaeus, Adv. Ilyeres,, lib. ii. caji. 47. 



FAITH UNDERMIXED AND OVERT^RO^y^^ 329 



in order that it may have faith, it must believe God; 
in order that it believe God, it must begin \vith re- 
nouncing the prejudices of its OAvn -svisdom on sin, on 
the future, on the judgment, on grace, on itself, on the 

world, on God, on all things Is it not Avritten 

that the natural man receiveth not the things of the 
Spirit of God, that he even cannot receive them, and that 
they are foolishness unto him?^ The gospel, accord- 
ingly, uill shock his reason or his conscience, or both. 
And yet he must submit upon the sole testimony of God; 
and it is not until after having thus settled his relation 
to it, that he -svill recognize it as being '■' the "svisdom 
of God and the power of God unto salvation to everyone 
that believeth." He must believe, then, without having 
seen; that is to say, the gospel, before he has compre- 
hended it, ought to confound his own wisdom, revolt his 
natural heart, buffet his pride, and condemn his own 
righteousness ! How then would you ever get it to be 
accepted by men who would, like you, wait to have 
erery thing approved, before receiving every thing? 
Imbued with your principles, they will impute to man 
in the Scriptures every thing that shocks their natural 
feelings. They will think that they ought to retrench 
from it the prejudices of the apostles on the conse- 
quences of Adam's sin, on the Trinity, on the expia- 
tion, on eternal punishments, on the gehenna, on the 
resurrection of the body, on the doctrine of devils, on 
election, on the gratuitous justification of the sinner 
by faith, perhaps also on miracles. Plow shall a man, 
if he be unhappy enough to imitate you, ever find life, 
peace, and joy, by means of faith ? How shall he hope 
against hope ? How shall he believe that he is ever 
saved, wretched man that he is? He will have to pass 
his days lost in vague, misty, uncertain doctrines ! and 
his life, his peace, his love, his obedience must remain, 
until death, such as his doctrines are ! AVe conclude, 
then, with this first advice : Make critical science a 
learned inquirer; don't make it a judge. 
1 1 Cor. ii. U. 



330 SACRED CRITICISM AN HISTORIAN, 

SECTION II. 

LET SACRED CRITICISM BE AN HISTORIAN, NOT A SOOTHSAYER. 

There is, in relation to the inspiration of the Scrip- 
tures, one other not less important precaution, which 
we must point out in the use that is made of science. 

The task of sacred criticism is to collect facts on the 
Scriptures : do not suffer her to engage you in vain 
hypotheses ; there she will do you much mischief. She 
ought to be an historian ; make her not a prophetess. 
When she divines, do not listen to her; turn your 
hack upon her; for she will dissipate your time, and 
more than your time. Now, the believer's safeguard 
here is still the doctrine of inspiration such as we have 
exhibited it; I mean of the inspiration, not of the men, 
but of the book. 

All Scripture is divinely inspired : such is the decla- 
ration of the authentic book of the Scriptures. But as 
for what passed in the understanding and in the con- 
science of the sacred writers, that is hardly ever revealed 
to us, and it is what we are not required to know. 
Much time and many words have been lost owing to 
men having neglected this grand principle. Scripture 
is inspired, whether the author knew or did not know 
beforehand what God was making him write. In such 
researches, tlierefore, as studying in each book of the 
Bible the particularities of its style, of its language, 
of its reasoning, and all the circumstances of its sacred 
writer, we can see nothing but good; they are useful, 
legitimate, respectful; and it is in these, certainly, there 
is science. Should the student proceed to endeavour, 
by these same characters, to fix its date, and the occa- 
sion ef its being written, still we can perceive nothing 
but what is instructive and becoming in such an in- 
vestigation. It may be well, for example, to know 



NOT A SOOTHSAYER. 'S'dl 

that it was under Nero that Paul wrote to the Jews,^ 
enjoining them " to be subject to the powers that be." 
It may be useful to know, that Peter had been mar- 
ried more than twenty-three years when Paul reminded 
the Corinthians ^ that he (the first of the popes, as 
he is called) still continued, in all his apostolic jour- 
ne}angs, to lead his wife about with him, and that 
the other apostles, and James himself (who was re- 
puted the first of the pillars of the church^), did the 
same thing. In this, too, there is science. We highly 
value, for the sake of the church of God, all labour 
which enables it to comprehend better a passage, aye, 
were it but a single word of holy Scripture. But to 
proceed from that to crude hypotheses on the sacred 
writers, to make what they say depend on the hap- 
hazard of their presumed circumstances, instead of 
considering their circumstances as prepared and willed 
by God for what they were to teach, to subordinate 
the nature, the abundance, or the conciseness of their 
teachings to the concurrence, more or less fortuitous, of 
their ignorances, or their recollections — this is to de- 
grade inspiration; it is to lay the foundations of infi- 
delity; it is to forget that " the men of God spake as 
they were moved by the Holy Ghost (^s^o/xsvo/), not 
with words which man's wisdom teacheth, but with 
those which the Holy Ghost teacheth." * 

Did the evangelists, it has been asked, read each 
other? And of what consequence is this to me, pro- 
vided they were "moved by the Spirit;" and if, after 
the example of the Thessalonians, I receive their book, 
not as the word of men, but, as it is in truth, the word 
of God ? ^ The putting of this question, we may re- 
mark in passing, may be very innocent, but it is no 
longer so in the manner in which it is treated, and in 
the importance that is attached to it. 

When people inquire whether John had read the 
gospels of the other three; whether Mark and Luke 

iRom. xiii. 1, 2 1 Cor. ix. 5. a Gal. ii. 9. 

* 1 Cor. ii. 13; 2 Pet. i. 21. « 1 Thess. ii. 13. 

30 



332 IMPERTINENT AND IDLE QUESTIONS 

h^d read the gospel of Matthew before writing their 
own (as Dr Mill ^ and Professor Hug ^ would have it, 
and as Dr Lardner' and Professor Michaelis* would 
not have it); when it is asked whether they only 
caused to be transcribed with discernment the most im- 
portant portions of the oral tradition (as Dr Gieseler^ 
would have it) ; when on this huge volumes are written, 
in attack or defence of these systems, as if faith and 
even science were really interested in them, and as if great 
things behoved to result from them to the Christian 
church ; when it is affirmed that the three first evang^ 
lists had consulted some original document now lost, 
Greek according to some, Hebrew according to others 
(an idea first conceived by Le Clerc, and taken up sixty 
years after him by Messrs Kopp, jMichaelis, Lessing, 
Niemeyer, Eichhorn, and others^) ; when people plunge 
still deeper into this romantic field ; when they reach at 
last a drama so complicated as the Bishop of Landaff's,' 
with his first Hebrew historical document, his second 
Hebrew dogmatical document, his third document, his 
fourth document (a translation of the first), then hig 
documents of the second class, formed by the translation 
of Luke and Mark and Matthew, which brings the 
sources at last to the number of seven, without reckon- 
ing three more of them peculiar to St Luke and St 
Mark ; or further still, with Mr Yeysie® in England, and 
Dr Gieseler in Germany, we would trace up either the 
three first gospels, or the four gospels, to apocryphal 
narratives in previous circulation in the Christian 
churches ; when, with the first of these doctors, people 
will have it that Mark copied them Avith a more literal 
exactness than Luke, on account, it is said, of his igno- 

1 Millii Prolejr., § 108. 

8 Einleitung in die Schriften des Neuen Testaments. Stuttsrart 
1821. 
8 Vol. vi. p. 220-250. * Introduction, &c., vol. i. p. 112-129. 

6 llistorisch-kritischer Versucli, &c. Minden 1818. 
« Home's Introd. vol. ii. p. 443, edit. 1818. 
' Bishop Marsh's Mirha'cli.i, vol. iii. part ii. p. 361. 
" Veyaie'8 Examination, p. 66. 



REJECTED BY TRUE SCIENCE. 333 

ranee of Greek, 'svhile Matthew, first written in Hebrew, 
must, beyond doubt, have been afterwards transhited 
into Greek by some one, who must have modified it 
out of Mark and Luke, and transmitted it to us at 
last in the state in which we possess it ; when, not con- 
tent with sketching these systems in a few phrases, as a 
task of passing curiosity, people have written thereon so 
many and such bulky volumes, as if the interests of the 
kingdom of God were involved in them, oh ! we cannot 
avoid saying that we experience, in the view of all this 
science, a profound sense of grief! But after all, is this 
science ? No ! these are no longer scientific inquirers — 
they have forsaken facts — they prophetize the history of 
the past ; these are the astrologers of theology. It is 
thought, in astronomy, that a book of observations on 
the smallest satellite discovered near Uranus, or on the 
finding of a second of parallax in the case of some star, 
or on a single spot measured in the moon, is a pre- 
cious acquisition for science, whilst all the writings of 
the Count de Boulainvilliers, and the three hundred 
volumes on the Barbaric sphere, on the influences, the 
aspects, or the horoscopes of the seven planetary bodies, 
can be for it no better than a piece of folly, or a useless 
encumbrance. Thus we should set a high/r value, in the 
pursuits of sacred criticism, on whatever might throw 
some surer light on the smallest passage of the Scrip- 
tures ; but what end could all these crude hypotheses 
ever serve ? In these, people desert the luminous paths 
of science, as well as those of faith ; they weary them- 
selves in the pursuit of empty nothings ! Yain and noisy 
toil expended in misty conjectures formed upon the 
clouds ! Nothing good can come down from them ! 
Wretched pursuits, which teach men to doubt where 
God teaches them to believe ! " Who is he," saitli the 
Lord, " who darkens, by words without knowledge, the 
counsels of the Most High ? " 

In fact, would that we could say that there was no- 
thing there beyond idle fancies, and an enormous loss 
of time ! But in "these, people do much worse than 



834 PIOUS YOUNG PERSONS MISLED. 

waste their precious hours : they lose their faith there ; 
they fascinate their mind's eyes ; they draw away young 
students from the great and first Author of the Scrip- 
tures. It is clear that these idle pursuits can proceed 
only from a want of faith in the inspiration of the 
Scriptures. Believe, for one moment, that Jesus Christ 
had given to his apostles (the 'rrojg -/.cci ri^ Matt. x. 19, 
20) the what and the how that they were to speak ; 
admit that the Holy Ghost made them relate the life 
of Jesus Christ, as he made them relate his sitting at 
the right hand of God, and you instantly perceive that 
all these hypotheses vanish into nothing. Not only do 
they teach you nothing, they cannot teach you any 
thing; hut they put your believing thoughts into a 
wrong track ; they gradually undermine the doctrine of 
inspiration ; they indirectly weaken God's testimony, 
its certainty, its perfection. They turn the thoughts ot 
your piety from their true direction ; they mislead those 
young persons who were looking for the living waters 
from the wells of the Scriptures, and who are drawn 
away to heal themselves amid the sands, far from the 
springs that gush up into eternal life. What, after all, 
will they find there ? Broken cisterns, clouds without 
water, and at most, perhaps fantastic streams, gleaming 
to them for some days in the sun, like a deceitful 
mirage on the deserts of human thought. 

What would you say of a learned divine who should 
endeavour to trace the discourses and the doctrines of 
Jesus Christ to the instructions of Joseph the car- 
penter, or to the lessons of the school at Nazareth ? 
Idle and pernicious task, you would exclaim. Well, 
then, the same must be said of all those conjectural 
systems which would, on human principles, explain the 
composition of the Scriptures. Idle and pernicious, we 
say ! Admit inspiration, and all this labour vanishes 
like an idle dream. The Scriptures are the word of 
God ; they are given by him, and we know that no 
prophecy ever came by the will of man ; but holy men 
of God spake as they were moved by the Holy 



IDLE QUESTIONS — HOW SET AT REST. 335 

Ghost,^ The story of Paul's nephew giving warning to 
his uncle in the prison of Antonia, is inspired by God, 
although Luke may have heard it twenty times from 
the mouth of the apostle before receiving it from the 
Holy Ghost. That story is inspired, equally Avith the 
account of the invisible angel who was commissioned 
by God to strike the king of the Jews upon his throne, 
in the city of Cesarea. The account given us of Jacob's 
ring-straked and speckled sheep is from God, as well 
as that of the creation of the heavens and the earth. 
The history of the fall of Ananias and Sapphira is 
as divinely inspired, as is that of the fall of Satan and 
his angels. 

Ah ! no doubt the evangelists had one common docu- 
ment after which these holy men of God spoke ; but as 
has been so well said by Bishop Gleig,^ that document 
was neither more nor less than just the preaching and 
the life of our divine Saviour. That was their proto- 
type. 

Accordingly, when you hear it asked, from what 
documents Matthew could have taken his account of 
the birth of Jesus Christ ? Luke, that of his early 
years ? Paul, the Saviour's appearance to St James, or 
the Saviour's words on the blessedness of giving? 
whence Hosea took what he says of the tears of Jacob ? 
and Jude, Enoch's prophecy ? and Michael's contention 
about the body of Moses ? — you may reply, that they 
were derived from the same source from which Moses 
learned the creation of the heaven and the earth. 

We have shown how sound views on the inspiration 
of the Scriptures, will preserve youthful students from 
being led into the two grand errors of modern criticism, 
and at the same time enable them to derive from that 
noble science the utmost possible amount of good. The 
former of these errors, we have said, consists in pre- 
tending to subject the Scriptures to our judgment, after 

1 2 Pet. i. 21. 

2 Remarks on Michaelis' Introd. to the New Testament, the 32d 
and following pages. Horne''8 Intiod. ii. p. 468. Ed. 1818. 



336 SACRED CRITICISM THE DOORKEEPER. 

having admitted their authenticity ; the latter consists 
in indulging dangerous conjectures on the sacred books. 
But we have still to make an important reflexion on the 
relations of learning to the great question which occu- 
pies us. 



SECTION III. 

SACRED CRITICISM IS THE DOORKEEPER OF THE TEMPLE, NOT 
ITS GOD. 

This reflexion will present itself at once under the 
form of an advice and of an argument. But let not 
this alarm the reader. "We venture on the advice only 
as a prelude to the argument; for we do not forget that 
our task in this book is to establish the fact of the divine 
inspiration, not to preach it. To begin with the advice ; 
it is as follows : — 

Learning is a doorkeeper who conducts you to the 
temple of the Scriptures. Never forget, then, that she 
is not the God, and that her house is not the temple. In 
other terms, when you study sacred criticism, beware of 
keeping to that, even as regards learning. She leaves 
you in the street ; you must enter. And now for the 
argument. 

If you penetrate, in fact, into the sanctuary of the 
Scriptures, then not only will you find inscribed by the 
hand of God on all its walls that God fills it, and that 
he is every where there, but, further, you will receive 
the proof of it experimentally. There you will behold 
him every where; there you will feel him every where. 
In other terms, when one reads God's oracles with care, 
he not only meets with the frequent declaration of theii 
entire inspiration, but, further, through unexpected 
strokes, and often through a single verse or the power 
of a single word, he receives a profound conviction of 
the divinity stamped upon it throughout. 

As regards advice, it must not be imagined that we 



ESSENTIAL ATTRIBUTES AND EXTERIOR FORMS. 337 

have given it with the view of discrediting learned in- 
vestigations ; we offer it, on the contrary, in their 
interest, and in order to their completion. In fact, it 
too often happens that a prolonged course of study, 
devoted to the extrinsic parts of the sacred book (its 
history, its manuscripts, its versions, its language), by 
entirely absorbing the attention of the men who give 
themselves to it, leaves them inattentive to its more 
intrinsic attributes, its meaning, its object, the moral 
power which displays itself there, the beauties that re- 
veal themselves there, the Hfe that diffuses itself there. 
And as there exist, nevertheless, necessary relations 
between these essential attributes and those exterior 
forms, two great evils result from this pre- occupation 
of the mind. By this absorption the student stifles his 
spiritual life as a man, and compromises final salva- 
tion. This, however, is not the evil we have to do 
with in these pages : as a learned inquirer, he compro- 
mises his science by it, and renders himself incapable 
of forming a sound estimate of the very objects of his 
studies. His learning is wanting in coherence and con- 
sistency, and from that very cause becomes contracted 
and creeping. How can a man become acquainted with 
the temple, when he has seen but the stones, and 
knows nothing of the Shekinah ? Can the types be 
understood, when he has not even a suspicion of their 
antitype? he has seen but altars, sheep, knives, uten- 
sils, blood, fire, incense, costumes, and ceremonies; he 
has not beheld the world's redemption, futurity, heaven, 
the glory of Jesus Christ ! And, in this state, he has 
been unable so much as to comprehend the relations 
which these external objects have amongst themselves, 
because he has not comprehended their harmony with 
the whole. 

A learned man, without faith, living in the days of 
Noah, who had studied the structure of the ark, would 
have lost his soul, no doubt ; but, further, he would 
have remained ignorant of a great part of the very ob- 
jects which he pretended to appreciate. 



338 ILLUSTRATION A ROMAN TRAVELLER. 

Suppose that a Roman traveller, in the days of 
Pompey the Great, had wished to descrihe Jerusalem 
and its temple. Arriving in the city on a Sabhath day, 
he repairs to the holy place with his guide ; he makes 
the tour of it ; he admires its enormous stones ; he 
measures its porticoes ; he inquires about its antiquity 
and the names of the architects ; he passes through its 
gigantic gates, which two hundred men daily open at 
sunrise and shut again at noon ; there he sees arriving 
by thousands, in regular order, the Levites and choristers 
in their linen habits : and while in the interior, the 
sons of Aaron perform their rites ; while the psalms of 
the prophet king resound under the sacred vaults, and 
thousands of choristers, accompanying them with their 
instruments, respond to each other in their sublime 
antiphonies ; while the law is read, the word preached, 
and the souls that look for the consolation of Israel are 
lifted up with delight to the glories that are invisible, 
and filled with the deepest awe in contemplating that 
God " with whom there is plenteous redemption ;" 
while aged Simeons are raising their thoughts to " that 
glorious salvation unceasingly waited for;" while sin- 
ners are turning to God ; while more than one poor 
publican strikes upon his breast ; while more than one 
poor widow, with joyous emotion, takes out her two 
mites for God's treasury; and while so many invisible 
but ardent prayers are rising towards heaven ; — what 
may we suppose our traveller to be doing? Why, 
counting the pillars, admiring the pavements, measuring 
the courts, scrutinizing the congregation, taking draw- 
ings of the altar of incense, the candlestick, the table 
of shewbread, the golden censer; after whifh, he walks 
off, mounts to the battlements of the fortress, goes down 
to the Xystus and to the brook Kodron', makes the 
circuit of the walls, counting his stops as he goes, and 
then returns to his quarters, there to write out his ob- 
servations and to prepare his book. No doubt, he 
might boast of his having seen the Hebrew naticm, and 
their worship and temple ; he might publisili his jour- 



HOW TO STTDY THE BIBLE. 339 

nej, and find numerous readers; buc. even with respect 
to the scientific knowledge which his book is meant to 
diffiLse. how many errors of judgment will be found in 
it ! and how many errors would the worshippers in the 
temple have to refute in it ! 

Here, then, is the advice we proffer, in the sole in- 
terests of your theological learning. It necessarily 
follows, from the necessary relations that subsist be- 
twixt the eremal ends contemplated by God in his 
Word and its external forms, that, in order to judge 
correctly of the latter, you must first have made your- 
selves acquainted with the former. 

If you would form a judgment of a physician, you 
would no doubt desire to know what country he is from, 
what has been his course of study, what universities he 
has attended, and what testimonials he can produce ; 
but should he be the first to tell you what are your 
most latent disorders ; should he reveal to you sensa- 
tions in your system which you have hitherto vaguely 
felt, and the secret reality of which you recognize as 
soon as he has defined them to you ; should he, above 
all, prescribe and supply the only remedy that could 
ever give you relief ; would not such an experience tell 
you ^ more about him than his diplomas can do ? 

"Well, then, the following is the counsel we venture 
to give to all such of our readers as have made any 
acquaintance with sacred criticism. Read the Bible, 
study the Bible by itself and for itself ; ask it, if you 
Kke, where it has taken its degrees, and in what school 
its writers have studied ; but come to its consultations, 
as a sick person eager to be cured ; be as careful to make 
the experience of its words, as you can have been in 
studying its language and its history ; and then, not 
only will you be h^ed (which is not the question at 
issue here), but you will be enlightened. " He that 
healed me said : Take up thy bed and walk ! Whether 
he be a sinner I know not : one thing I know, that 
whereas I was blind, now I see !"^ 
1 John ix, 25. 



840 THE BIBLE ITS OWN WITNESS. 

Here the author would take occasion ta mention what 
a thirst he felt for apologetical books during his youth- 
ful studies ; how Abbadie, Leslie, Huet, Turretine, 
Grotius, Littleton, Jennings, Ranhardt, and Chalmers 
formed his habitual reading ; and how, while tormented 
with a thousand doubts, he came at last to be convinced 
and satisfied only by the word itself of the Scriptures. 
That word gives testimony to itself, not only by its 
assertions, but by its effects, like light, like heat, like 
life, like health ; for it carries in its beams health, life, 
heat, and light. A man might prove to me, by correct 
calculations, that at this moment the sun ought to be 
above the horizon ; but can I have any need of these, if 
my eye behold him, if I am bathed in his beams and 
invigorated by them ? 

Read the Bible, then ; do not be learned by halves ; 
let every thing have its proper place. It is the Bible 
that will convince you. It will tell you whether it 
came from God. And when you shall have heard a 
voice there, sometimes more powerful than the sound of 
mighty waters, sometimes soft and still as the sound 
that fell on the ear of Elijah : " The Lord, merciful 
and compassionate, the God who is pitiful, slow to 
wrath, abundant in mercy, the God of all consolation, 
the God who pardons so much, and more ! ! " .... ah, 
then, we venture to tell you beforehand, that the simple 
reading of a psalm, of a story, of a precept, of a verse, 
of a word in a verse, will, erelong, attest the divine 
inspiration of all the Scriptures to you more powerfully 
than could have been done by all the most solid reason- 
ings of doctors or of books. Then you will see, you 
will know by experience, that God is every where in the 
Scriptures ; then you will not ask of them if they are 
inspired ; for you will feel them to be quick and power- 
ful searchers of the thoughts and desires of the heart, 
sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the divid- 
ing asunder of your soul and spirit, and of your joints 
and marrow, causing your tears to flow from a det^p 
and unknown source, overthrowing you with resistless 



THE MAJESTY OF THE SCRIPTURES. 341 

power, and raising you up again with such a tenderness, 
and such sympathies, as are found only in God. 

All this is as yet mere advice ; but Ave proceed to 
show in what respect, nevertheless, these considerations 
may be presented, if not as a proof, at least as a strong 
presumption, in favour of the inspiration of the very- 
words of Scripture. In them, in fact, we indicate to our 
readers a threefold experience, which at all times has 
borne the fruit of profound convictions among other 
Christians, and the testimony rendered by which ought, 
at least, to strike them as demanding the most serious 
consideration. 

One of the strongest proofs, no doubt, of the di^-ine 
authority of the Scriptures, is that majesty of theirs which 
fills us with respect and awe ; it is the imposing unity 
of that book, the composition of which extends over a 
period of fifteen hundred years, and which has had so 
many authors, some of whom wrote no less than two 
centuries before the fabulous times of Hercules, Jason, 
and the Argonauts ; others in the heroic days of Priam, 
Achilles, and Agamemnon; others in the days of Thales 
and Pythagoras ; others in the age of Seneca, Tacitus, 
Plutarch, Tiberius, and Domitian; and who all, neverthe- 
less, pursue one and the same plan, constantly advancing, 
as if they had all understood each other, towards one sole 
grand end, the history of the world's redemption by the 
Son of God ; it is this vast harmony of all the Scrip- 
tures ; this Old Testament filled with Jesus Christ, as 
well as the New; this universal history, which nothing 
stops, which tells of the revolutions of empire to the end 
of time, and which, when its scenes of the past have 
come to a close, continues them onward with those of 
the future, until the moment arrive when all the world's 
empires shall have become the possession of Jesus Christ 
and his saints : — at the first page, the earth created for 
the reception of sinless man ; in the following pages, 
the earth cursed for the reception of man ever sinning ; 
at the last page, a new earth for the reception of man 
who will never sin more ! — at the first page, the tree of 



342 TESTIMONY OF MINISTERS, AND OP 

life interdicted, paradise lost, sin entering into the world 
bj the first Adam, and death by sin ; at the last page, 
paradise found again, life again entering into the world 
by the second Adam, death vanquished, no more sorrow 
to be found, God's image restored in man, and the tree 
of life in the midst of the paradise of God. Assuredly 
there is in this majestic whole, commencing before there 
were men, and continued on to the end of time, a power- 
ful and altogether heavenly unity ; a convergence of 
long ages, universal, immense, whose grandeur capti- 
vates thought, transcends all our human conceptions, 
and proclaims its Author's divinity as irresistibly as, on 
a summer night, the view of a sky glittering with stars, 
and the thought of all those shining worlds which re- 
volve night and day in the immensity of space. " My- 
riads of things in perfect intimacy and symphony," says 
one of the earliest fathers of the Church.^ And yet, 
over and above the beauties presented by the Scriptures, 
viewed thus as a whole, we have to contemplate some- 
thing not less glorious, which reveals to us also the 
divine action in their smallest parts, and attests to lis 
their verbal inspiration. 

Three orders of persons, or rather three orders of 
experiences, testify to this. 

1. And first, if you consult ministers who have spent 
their whole lives in meditating on the Scriptures, with 
the view of finding daily nourishment from them for the 
Lord's flocks, they will tell you that the more they have 
given themselves to this blessed study, and have set 
themselves to look more narrowly into the oracles of 
God, the more also has their admiration of the letter of 
that Word increased. Surprised, as they proceed, by 
unexpected beauties, they have recognised in these, even 
in the most minute expressions, instances of divine fore- 
sight, profound mutual bearings, spiritual grandeurs 
which reveal tliemselves there ])y the solo fact of a more 
exact translation, or of the attention of the mind being 

1 "Muji'flt (fi'Kct, Koii o-CfjL^&yx.'''' Theopliilus ad Autolyc, lib. i. cap. 36. 
See also Justin iVIurtf r ad GraecoB cohort., c. 8. 



THE INTERPRETERS OF PROPHECIES. 343 

longer directed to the detail of a single verse. They 
will tell you that the man of God who keeps for some 
time close to the eyes of his soul some text of that holy 
book, soon feels himself called to adopt the language of 
the naturalist who, with the microscope, studies a leaf 
from the forest, with its integuments, its nerves, its 
thousand pores, and its thousand vessels. lie that made 
the forest made the leaf ! he exclaims ; yes, says the 
other, and he who made the Bible, made its verses also ! 

2. A second order of experiences, of which we would 
here cite the testimony, is that of the interpreters of the 
prophecies. All of them will tell you with what evi- 
dence, after one has bestowed some time on that study, 
it is perceived that in these miraculous pages every 
verse, every word, without any exception, and even 
down to apparently the most indifferent particle, must 
have been guaranteed by God. The slightest alteration 
in a verb, in an adverb, or even in the simplest con- 
jimction, might lead an interpreter into the most serious 
error. And it has often been remarked, that if the 
prophecies that are now fulfilled were ill understood 
before the event, this arose, in a great measure, from 
the circumstance that people had not examined, with 
sufficient attention, all the details of their text. Of 
this we might adduce many examples. 

3. But there is yet another order of persons who 
attest to us more loudly, if possible, the divine inspira- 
tion of the Scriptures, even in their smallest parts ; 
these are Christians who have experienced their power, 
first in their conversion, and afterwards in the conflicts 
that followed. Go, and in the biographies of those 
who have been great in the kingdom of God, look for 
the moment at which they passed from death unto life; 
inquire, around you. about the same fact, of the Chris- 
tians who in their turn have experienced this virtue ol 
the Wor<i of God : they will all bear one unanimous 
testimony. When the holy Scripture, overmastering 
their conscience, made them lie low at the foot of the 
cross, and there revealed to them the love of God, what 

31 



344 TESTIMONY OF GOD S SAINTS. 

seized hold of thera was not the Bible as a whole, it 
was not a chapter, it was a verse ; aye, a word, which 
was for them like the hunfble and powerful knob of 
the electric pile, the disks of which should mount to 
heaven, or, as it were, the point of a sword wielded by 
the very hand of God. They found it quick and 
powerful. It was an influence from above which was 
concentrated in a single word, and which made it be- 
come for them, " as a fire, saith the Lord, and as a 
hammer that breaketh the stone."^ They perused, in 
the moment of their need, a psalm, or some words of 
the prophets, or some sentences from the epistles, or 
some narratives of sacred history; and as they were 
reading, behold, a word seized their conscience Avith an 
unknown, sweeping, irresistible force. It was no more 
than a single word, but that word remained upon their 
soul; there it sooke, there it preached, there it resounded, 
as if all the church bells of the city of God had been 
struck to call him to fasting, to the bending of the knee, 
to prayer, to meeting with Jesus Christ ! It was but a 
word, but that word was from God. It was but one of 
apparently the meanest chords of the harp from heaven; 
but that chord was so stretched as to be in unison with 
the heart of man; it gave forth unexpected sounds, all- 
powerful harmonies, which stirred their inmost souls; 
and then they felt that those tones are miraculous, 
that those harmonies proceed from heaven. They knew 
it to be the call of Jesus Christ. 

Such, then, is the voice of the Church ; such has 
been in every age the unanimous testimony of the 
saints. The inspiration which the Bible attributes to 
itself, they have said, we ourselves have experienced. 
We believe it, no doubt, because it attests it; but we 
believe it also because we have seen it, and because we 
ourselves can bear to it the testimony of a blessed ex- 
perience, and of an irresistible impulse of feeling. 

One might adduce such examples by thousands. Let 

» Jer. xxiii. 29. 



OF LUTHKR AND AUGUSTINE. 345 

US be content to name here two of the noblest minds 
that have ever served as guides to humanity. Let the 
reader call to his recollection how the two greatest lights 
of ancient and modern times were kindled. It was a 
word — a single word of the Scriptures — which, just at 
the moment that had been prepared by God, put into 
their souls the light of the Holy Ghost. 

Luther, while as yet a monk, went off to Rome. He 
lay ill a-bed at Bologna, in a foreign land, overwhelmed 
with the burden of his guilt, and believing himself to 
be at the gates of death. It was then that the 17th 
verse of the 1st chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, 
" Justus ex fide vivet " — " the just shall live by faith " — 
came like a beam from heaven, and enlightened his 
whole being. These simple words seized him twice 
with a superhuman power; first at Bologna, there to 
fill him with inexpressible energy and peace; after that 
at Rome itself, there to check and elevate him, while 
with an idolatrous crowd he dragged himself on both 
knees up Pilate's fabulous staircase. It was with these 
words that the Reformation of the West commenced. 
" Words of creative power for the Reformer and the 
Reformation," exclaims on this subject my precious 
friend Merle D'Aubigne. It was by them that God 
then said, " Let there be light, and there was light." ^ 
"In truth," says the Reformer himself, "I felt as if 
entirely born again ; and these words were for me the 
very gate of paradise." " Hie me prorsus renatum esse 
sensi, et apertis portis in ipsum paradisum intrasse." 

Here, too, shall we not call to mind the greatest of 
the doctors of Christian antiquity (the admirable Au- 
gustine), when, in his garden near Milan, wretched, 
ill at ease, feeling, as Luther felt, a tempest in his soul, 
as he reclined under a fig-tree, ^'jactans voces misera- 
biles et dimittens hahznas lacrymis" groaning, and 
giving vent to a flood of tears, he heard from an ad- 
joining house that youthful voice, which sang, with 

* See Preface to the History of the Refortgation. 



346 TESTIMONY OF CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. 

a rapid repetition of the burthen of the song : '' I'olle^ 
lege ! tolle^ lege 1 " " Take and read ; take and read ! " 
He went off to the neighbourhood of Alypius for the 
roll of the Epistles of Paul, which he had left there; 
{adripui, aperui et legi in silentio) — he grasped it, 
opened it, and read in silence the first chapter that 
caught his eye. And when he came to the 13th verse 
of the xiii, chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, then 
all was decided by a word. Jesus had overcome : the 
grand career of the holiest of the doctors began its 
course. A word, but a word from God, had lighted 
up that mighty beacon which was to illuminate ten 
centuries of the church's existence, and whose rays 
delight her still. After thirty-on^ years of revolt, of 
conflicts, of relapses, of wretchedness, faith, life, peace 
had descended into that loving soul; a new light, but 
an everlasting light, had risen upon it. After these 
words, he w^anted nothiiig more ; he shut the book, he 
tells us; he no longer felt doubt. '•'■ Nee ultra volui 
legere^ nee opus erat; " for with the close of that sentence, 
a stream of light and security was poured into his soul ; 
and all the night of his doubts had vanished. " Statim 
quippe cum fine hujus sententice^ quasi luce securitatis 
infusa cordi meo, omnes duhitationis tenehrcB diffuge- 
runt !" 

There is one experience more of the same kind with 
which we have been too deeply struck not to refer to 
it in these pages, although its testimony may probably 
be admitted by those only who are already pious men. 
The farther a man advances in the Christian life — the 
more abundant the measure he receives of God's Spirit 
— the more, also, you must have observed what, in two 
contrary senses, on the one hand, our sacred books, 
and, on the other, the best writings of men, become for 
him. "Wliile you will see him ever more and more in- 
dependent of the latter, because more fully aware that 
they have hardly any thing more to teach him, or at 
least, because, after having read them once, he has re- 



STRONG HISTORICAL PRESUMPTIONS. 347 

ceived all that they have to give him, mark with admi- 
ration how very much otherwise it is for him with 
respect to the divine sayings, and with what a marvel- 
lous contrast he is seen to be ever more attached to the 
letter of the Scriptures, ever more convinced of the 
wisdom that is revealed there, and of the divine power 
put forth there, ever more eager to drink in their slightest 
expressions, ever more capable of deriving delicious 
nourishment, for whole days and nights, from a single 
passage, and from a single verse ! Certainly, there is in 
this fact, to the person who has witnessed it, something 
peculiarly striking. We ourselves have seen it. 

Such, then, is the triple testimony which we would 
invoke, and by which the Church attests to us that an 
influence from God has been infused into the smallest 
parts of the sacred Word, in such wise, that " all Scrip- 
ture is divinely inspired." 

We must, however, be properly understood. We 
have made no pretension here to impose upon some the 
experience of others. Proofs from feeling, are proofs to 
those alone who have felt. They have, no doubt, an 
irresistible force for men who, having experienced them, 
have seen the testimonies of the Word confirmed in 
them with unquestionable evidence ; but nothing would 
be less logical than to offer them as demonstrations to 
souls who are strangers to them. If you have had 
these experiences, you will be more than convinced, 
and we should have no more to say to you. Accord- 
ingly, we have presented them only as strong historical 
presumptions, to dispose you in this way to receive with 
readier submission the Scriptural proofs already put 
before you. A whole multitude of well-informed and 
pious persons, we say, attest to you for ages past, and 
by a threefold experience, that in the close study of the 
Word of God, one is brought to recognise, on the 
clearest evidence, its inspiration, even in its words. 
Let this act, at least, as a powerful recommendation to 
listen with respect and candour to the testimonies in 



348 TAKE AND READ. 



which the Bible itself has told you what it is. At least, 
let this Yoice of the church call to you, as it were, from 
an adjoining house, Take and read^ take and read ! 
adripe, aperi, lege in silentio ! Read it in silence ; and 
you yourself will feel how far its inspiration goes. No 
more doubt, you will say, like Augustine ; for the 
morning star has risen in my heart ; and you will not 
need to read more. Nee ultra voles legere^ nee opus 
erit ; statim quippe cum fine unius sententioB, quasi 
luce securitatis in/usa cordi tuo, omnes duhitationis tene- 
hrw d'lffugient I 



CONCLUSION RETROSPECT. 349 



CHAPTER YII. 

CONCLUSION. 

The question has been put, Is the Bible inspired, even 
in its language ? We have affirmed that it is. In 
other words (for we have willingly consented to reduce 
our whole thesis to this second form, equivalent to the 
first), the question has been put. Have the men of God 
given us the Scriptures exempt from all error, great or 
small, positive or negative. We have affirmed that they 
have. 

The Scriptures are composed of books, phrases, and 
words. Without starting any hypothesis as to the 
manner in which God has dictated them, we maintain, 
with the Scriptures, that this word is divine, without any 
exception. And were any one to ask of us how God 
proceeded in order to guarantee all their words, we 
should wait, before replying to him, until he has let us 
know in what manner God proceeded in order to guar- 
antee all their ideas ; and we should be reminded of 
the child who said to his father, <' Father, where does 
God get his colours when he dies the cherries with 
such a beautiful red ^ " " My boy, I will tell you that 
when you have let me know how he paints all the leaves 
with so fine a green." 



SECTION I. 

RETROSPECT. 

Divine inspiration, we have said, is not a system ; it 



350 RETROSPECTIVE 



is a fact : and tliat fact, if attested by God, becomes to 
us a dogma. But it is the book that is inspired ; it is 
>vith the book that, above all things, we have to do, and 
not with the writers. We might almost dispense with 
believing the inspiration of the thoughts, while we could 
not dispense with believing that of the language. If 
the words of the book are God's words, of what conse- 
quence to me, after all, are the thoughts of the writer ? 
Whatever his mental qualifications, what proceeded from 
his hands would always be the Bible : whereas, let the 
thoughts be given him, and not the words, and it is not 
a Bible that he gives me, it is only something more than 
a sermon. 

Nevertheless, we have been at great pains to make 
o«r reservations. 

Scripture is entirely the word of man, and Scripture 
is entirely the word of God. O man, we have said, it 
is here especially that you are called to wonder and ad- 
mire ! It has spoken for thee, and like thee ; it presents 
itself to thee, wholly clothed in humanity; the Eternal 
Spirit (in this respect at least, and in a certain measure) 
has made himself man, in order to speak to thee, as the 
Eternal Son made himself man, in order to redeem thee. 
It was with this view that he chose, before all ages, men 
subject to the same affections with thyself.^ He pro- 
vided for this, and prepared their character, their cir- 
cumstances, their style, their manner, their times, their 
way. And thus it is that the gospel is the tenderness of 
God, and the sympathy of God ; as it is, to speak with 
St Paul, " the wisdom of God and the power of God." 

Let it not be imagined, then, that the stamp of the 
individual character of the sacred writers in the several 
books of the Bible, authorizes us to regard their inspira- 
tion as intermittent or incomplete. It matters little for 
the fact of their divine inspiration whether there be the 
absence or the concurrence of the sacred writer's emo- 
tions. God may either employ or dispense with th'?m. 



> James v. 17. 



SUMMARY. 351 



If he uses second causes in all his other works, why 
should he abstain from doing so in divine inspiration ? 
Besides, as we have remarked, this individuality, which 
is made the ground of objection, equally shows itself in 
those parts of Scripture which are most incontestibly 
dictated by God. This system of a gradual and inter- 
mittent inspiration presents characters at once of com- 
plication, rashness, and childishness ; but what, above 
all, condemns it, is its being directly contrary to the 
testimony which the Scripture has borne to its own 
nature. After all, think not that, in employing our 
personality, it has done so at random. No : all its 
several writers were chosen from before the foundation 
of the world for the work to which they were destined, 
and God prepared them for it, as he did St Paul, 
" from their mother's womb." Oh, but the sacred books 
are admirable in this respect; how incomparable do 
they appear, and how soon do we abundantly recognize 
in them the divine power which caused them to be 
written ! 

Scripture is then from God ; it is every where from 
God, and every where it is entirely from God. That is 
our thesis ; and this is what we have done to establish 
it ; this we could do only by Scripture. 

If God reveals himself, it is for him to tell us, in that 
same revelation, in what measure he has been pleased 
to do so. Far from us be all idle hypotheses ! In these 
we should only meet with our own fancies, and fasci- 
nate the eye of our faith. "What then say the Scrip- 
tures ? The whole question lies there. 

First of all, we have said, they declare to us, that all 
the words of the prophets are entirely given and war- 
ranted by God. In the second place, they attest to us 
that all the scriptures of the Old Testament, are the 
words of the prophets. Finally, they demonstrate to us 
that the New Testament Scriptures au no less so. All 
the words of the New Testament, then, are equally war- 
ranted by God. 

This, too, was the conviction of the apostles of Jesus 



352 RETROSPECTIVE 

Christ. See ■v\'hat use they made of the Bible. What 
was it in their eyes ? Did they not believe in its en- 
tire divine inspiration ? Is it possible not to conclude 
from their whole conduct that, for them, the Scriptures 
were inspired of God, even to their most minute ex- 
pressions ? 

But there is for us a proof still more decisive than 
all the rest. Let us consult the example of the Son of 
God himself. Let us attend to what he says of the 
Scriptures. Let us listen to him, especially when he 
quotes them. Assuredly (we must not be afraid to say 
it) among the most ardent defenders of their verbal 
inspiration, there is not one to be found who has ever 
expressed himself with more respect for the altogether 
divine authority, and the perpetuity of their most mi- 
nute expressions, than has been done by the man Jesus. 
And when a modern writer happens to quote the Bible 
in the way that Jesus Christ quoted it, in order to de- 
duce some doctrine from it, you will see him forthwith 
ranked among the most enthusiastic partisans of our 
doctrine of plenary inspiration. 

Nevertheless we have had objections to consider. 

Some opposed to us the necessity for translations, 
and their unavoidable imperfection ; others, the numer- 
ous various readings presented by the ancient manu- 
scripts which had to be employed in printing our Scrip- 
tures. We replied that those two facts could nowise 
affect the question. It is the primitive text that we 
have to do with. Were the apostles and prophets com- 
missioned to give us a Bible entirely inspired and with- 
out the admixture of any error ? — such is the question. 
But, at the same time, we have been called to partici- 
pate in the Church's triumph at the state in which our 
sacred manuscripts are found, and the astonishing insig- 
nificance of the various readings. The Lord's provi- 
dence has watched over this inestimable deposit. 

What was farther adduced as an objection to the 
inspiration of the words, was the use made by the 
apostles, in the New Testament, of the Septuagint ; but 



SUMMARY. 353 



we, on tlie contrary, pointed to the fact that in the 
independent and sovereign manner in which they have 
made use of it, you have a fresh proof (of the presence) 
of the Spirit Avho caused them to speak. 

Finally, some have gone so far as to object to us, that, 
after all, there are errors in the Scriptures ; and these 
errors they have specifically stated to us. This fact we 
denied. Because they have not at once understood some 
narrative, or some expression, some have rashly ventured 
to censure the Word of God ! "While willing to present 
some examples of the recklessness and erroneousness of 
such reproaches, we hastened at the same time to take 
note of this objection, for the purpose of showing its 
authors that they could not attack the inspiration of the 
language without imputing error to the thoughts of the 
Holy Ghost. Reckless indeed they are ! At the very 
time that they say of the Bible, as Pilate said of Jesus 
Christ, " AVhat evil hath he done ?" they put it upon 
its defence at the bar of their tribunal ! To such ob- 
jectors we would say, " What then would you do to 
those who smite him on the cheek, who spit upon him, 
and who say to him, ' Prophesy who it is that smote 
thee ? ' Sarely it is not for you to place yourselves on 
such a judgment-seat." 

The language of Scripture has been blamed for 
erroneous expressions, betraying, on the part of the 
sacred authors, an ignorance (otherwise, it is said, par- 
donable enough) of the constitution of the heavens, and 
of the phenomena of nature. But here, as elsewhere, 
the objections, on being viewed more closely, pass into 
subjects of admiration. It is as if, in making us polish 
the diamonds of holy Scripture by a more diligent ex- 
amination, they elicited unexpected splendours, and 
served only to dazzle us with more brilliant reflections 
of its divinity. At the same time that you cannot find 
in the Bible any of those errors which abound in the 
sacred books of all Pagan nations, as Avell as m all the 
philosophical systems of antiquity, it in a thousand ways 
discloses in its language the knowledge o^ " the Ancient 



354 RETROSPECTIVE 



of Days;" and you will, erelong, ascertain that — whether 
we look to the expressions which it employs, or to those 
which it avoids employing — that language maintained, 
throughout thirty centuries, a scientific and profound 
harmony with the eternal truth of facts. In that lan- 
guage it seems to say : What you knew only but as yester- 
day, I spoke not of to you, yet I knew it from eternity. 

The words of Paul also were objected to us, in which 
that apostle distinguishes that which the Lord says 
from that which he himself says. We believe we have 
shown that, on the contrary, he could not have given a 
more convincing proof of his inspiration than is found 
in the boldness of such a distinction, seeing that, with 
an authority altogether divine, he repeals some of the 
laws of the Old Testament. 

Still this was not all ; we had to reply to other objec- 
tions, presenting themselves rather under the form of 
systems, and which would make bold to exclude a part 
of God's book from being held to be inspired. 

Some have been willing to admit the inspiration of the 
thoughts of the Bible, and to contest that of the language 
only; but we reminded such, first, that there exists so ne- 
cessarya dependencebetween the thoughts and the words, 
that it is impossible to conceive a complete inspiration 
of the former without a full inspiration of the latter. 

We charged this fatal system, besides, with being no 
better than a jmrely human hypothesis, fantastically 
assumed, without there being any thing in Scripture to 
authorize it. Accordingly we said that it led inevitably 
to suppositions that were most disparaging to the Word of 
God; while, at the same time, to our mind, it removed no 
difficulty, seeing that, after all, it but substitutes for one 
inexplicable operation of God another which is no less so. 

But further, we added, what purpose does this sys- 
tem serve, since it is incomplete, and since, by the con- 
fession of tiiose even who maintain it, it applies to one 
portion only of the Scriptures ? 

• Others, again, have l)een ready sometimes io concede 
to us the plenary inspiration of certain books, but with 



SUMMAJIY. 35a 



the exclusion from these of the historical writings. 
Besides that every distinction of this kind is gratuitous, 
rash, opposed to the terms of the Scriptures, we were 
fain to show that these hooks are perhaps, of the whole 
Bible, those whose inspiration is best attested, most 
necessary, most evident ; those which Jesus Christ 
quoted with most respect ; those which sound men's 
hearts and tell the secrets of their consciences. They 
foretell the most important events of the future in their 
most minute details ; they constantly announce Jesus 
Christ; they describe the character of God; they inculcate 
doctrines ; they give forth laws ; they make revelations. 
In a word, they exhibit the splendour of a divine wis- 
dom, both in what they say, and in what they are silent 
about. In order to write them, more than men, more 
than angels, were called for. 

We have been asked, finally, if we could discover afiy 
thing divine in certain passages of the Scriptures, too 
vulgar, it has been said, to be inspired. "We believe we 
have shown how much wisdom, on the contrary, shines 
out in these passages, as soon as, instead of passing a 
hasty judgment on them, we would look in them for the 
teaching of the Holy Ghost. 

In fine, we besought the reader to go directly to the 
Scriptures, for the purpose of devoting to the prayerful 
study of them that time which he might hitherto have 
given to judging them ; and we assured him, on the 
testimony of the whole church, and after a threefold 
experience, that the divine inspiration of the minutest 
parts of the Holy Word will erelong reveal itself to him, 
if he will but study it with reverence. 

But we must draw to a close. 



SECTION II. 

It follows from all we have said, that there are in the 

Christian world but two schools, or two religions : that 

which puts the Bible above every thing, and that which 

puts something above the Bible. The former was evi- 

32 



356 CONCLUSION. 



dently that of Jesus Christ ; the latter has been that of 
the rationalists of all denominations and of all times. 

The motto of the former is this : The whole written 
Word is inspired by God, even to a single jot and tittle ; 
the Scripture cannot be destroyed. 

The motto of the second is this : There are human 
judges lawfully entitled to pass judgment on the Word 
of God. 

Instead of putting the Bible above all, it is, on the 
contrary, either science, or reason, or human tradition, 
or some new inspiration, which it places above that 
book. Hence all rationalisms ; hence all false religions. 

They (profess to) correct the Word of God, or (to) 
complete it ; they contradict it, or they interdict it ; they 
make it be read without reverence by their pupils, or 
they prohibit the reading of it. 

Those rationalists, for example, who, at the present 
day, profess Judaism^ place above the Bible, if not their 
own reason, that at least of the 2d, 3d, 4th, 5th, and 
6th centuries; that is to say, the human traditions of 
their Targums, the Mischna, and the Gemara of their two 
enormous Talmuds. That is their Alkoran : under its 
weight, they have smothered the law and the prophets. 

Those rationalists who profess the Roman religion^ 
will, in their turn, subject the Bible, not to their own 
reason, but, first, to the reason of the 7th, 8th, 0th, 10th, 
11th, 12th, and 13th centuries, which they call tradition, 
(that is to say, the reason of Dionysius the Little, Hinc- 
mar, Radbert, Lanfranc, Damascenus, Anastasius Bibli- 
othecarius, Burkardt, Ives of Chartres, Gratian, Isidore 
Mercator) ; and next, to that of a priest, ordinarily an 
Italian, whom they call Pope^ and whom they declare 
to be infallible in the dejinitiori of matters of faith} 
Does the Bible require the adoration of the virgin, the 

> This is the doctrine of the UltraVnontanists, supported both by 
popes (Pascal, Pius, Leo, Pela<;ius, Boiiilace, Gregory) and by coun- 
cils. Bellarmin, Duval, and Arsdckin assure us that it is the com- 
mon sentiment of all theologians of any note. '* Haec doctrina 
communis est inter onmes notae theologos." (Arsdekin, Theol., vol. 
i. p. 118, Antwerp 168i'. 



RATIONALISM. 357 



service of angels, payment for pardons, the worshipping 
of images, auricular confession to a priest, forbidding to 
marry, forbidding the use of meats, praying in a foreign 
tongue, interdicting the Scriptures to the people,^ and 
that there should be a sovereign pontiff? And when it 
speaks of a future Rome/ is it otherwise (all the first 
fathers of the church are agreed about this^) than by 
pointing to it as the seat of the Man of Sin ; as the 
centre of a vast apostasy ; as a Babylon, drunk with the 
blood of the saints and the witnesses of Jesus Christ, 
which made all the nations to drink of the wine of the 
fury of her fornication ; as the mother of fornications and 
abominations of the earth ? 

Those rationalists that profess an impure Protestant- 
ism^ and who reject the doctrines of the Reformation, 
will put above the Bible, if not the reason of Socinus and 
Priestley, or of Eichhorn and Paulus, or of Strauss and 
Hegel, at least their own. There is a mixture, they will 
tell you, in the Word of God. They sift it, they cor- 
rect it ; and it is with the Bible in their hand that they 
come to tell you : There is no divinity in Christ, no re- 
surrection of the body, no Holy Ghost, no devil, no 
demons, no hell, no expiation in the death of Jesus 
Christ, no native corruption in man, no eternity in pu- 
nishments, no miracles in facts, (what do I say even ?) 
no reality in Jesus Christ ! 

1 Prohibemus etiam, ne libros Veteris Testamenti aut Novi laici 
permittantur habere, nisi forte psalterium, vel breviurium pro di- 
vinis ofl&ciis, aut horas beatse Mariae, aliquis ex devotione habere 
velit. Sed ne prasmissos libros habeant in vulgari translates, arc- 
tissime inhibemus. (The 14th canon of the Council of Toulouse, 
under Pope Gregory IX., year 1229.) Concilia Labbaei, torn, ii, 
par. 1-8, Paris 1771. 

2 2 Thess. ii. 1-12; Rev. xiii. 1-8, xviii. 1-24. St Jerome, Exhor- 
tat. to Mnrcella to induce her to emigrate from Rome to Bethlehem: 
*' Lege Apocalypsira Johannis, et quid de muliere purpurata," &c. 

. . . " septem montibus. et Babylonis cantetur exitu, contuere," &c. 

. . . "Tertullian : Sic et Babylon apudJohannen nostrum RomunaB 
urbis figura est," &c. (Adv. Judaeos, Parisiis 1675.) 

8 Chrysostom (Horn, iv. in 2d epist. ad Thessal., c. 2.) "What 
hindered," says he (of his own time) '' the manifestation of the man 
of sin, was the Roman Empire : ' ToutsVt/v it a.^x^ Vmfx.a.iKri. 'Oraa 
u^Qri \x fjtvrov, TOTt ixiivoi ri^u.'' " 



358 CONCLUSION. 



Those rationalists, in fine, who profess Mysticism (the 
Illuminati, the Shakers, the Paracelsists, the Bourigno- 
nists, the Labadists, the Boehmists) will put above the 
text (of the Bible) their own hallucinations, their in- 
ward word, their revelations, and the Christ who (they 
say) is within them. They will speak with disdain of 
the letter, of the literal meaning, of the gospel facts, 
of the man Jesus, or of the outward Christ (as they call 
him), of the cross of Golgotha, of preaching, of worship, 
of the sacraments. They are above all these carnal 
helps ! Hence their dislike for the doctrine of God's 
judiciary righteousness, of the reality of sin, of the di- 
vine wrath against evil, of grace, of election, of satisfac- 
tion, of Christ's imputed righteousness, of the punish- 
ments to come. 

Disciples of the Saviour, hearken to what he says in 
his Word : there it is that he speaks to us; there is our 
reason, there our inspiration, there our tradition. It 
is the lamp for our feet. " Sanctify me by thy truth, 
Lord, thy word is truth !" 

Let our reason, then, put forth all its energies, under 
the eye of God, first, in order to recognize the Scrip- 
tures as being from him, and then to study them. 
Let it every day turn more closely to these divine oracles, 
in order to correct itself by them, not to correct them 
by it; there to seek for God's meaning, not to put our 
own in its place; to present itself before their holy 
utterances as a meek and teachable handmaiden, not 
as a noisy and conceited sybil. Let its daily prayer, 
amid the night that surrounds it, be that of the infant 
Samuel, " Speak, Lord, for thy servant heaveth ! " " The 
law of- the Lord is perfect; the words of the Lord are 
pure words, as silver tried in a furnace of earth, puri- 
fied seven times." ^ 

And, on the other hand, let us seek the Holy Spirit; 

"let us have the unction of the Holy One;" let us be 

baptized with it. It is the Spirit alone that will lead 

us into the whole truth of the Scriptures; which will 

' Pa. xii. (). 



LIGHT OF THE LAST DAY. 359 

Lj them shed the love of God abroad in our hearts, 
and will witness with our spirits that we are the chil- 
dren of God; bj applying to us their promises, by giving 
us in these the earnest of our inheritance, and the 
pledges of his adoption. In vain should we bear in 
our hands, during eighteen hundred years, the holy 
Scriptures, as the Jews still do : \vi:hout that Spirit we 
should never comprehend in them the things of the 
Spirit of God : " They would appear to us foolishness, 
because the natural man receives them not, and even 
cannot do so, seeing that they are spiritually discerned."^ 
But at the. same time, w^hile we ever distinguish the 
Spirit from the letter, let us beware of ever separating 
them. Let it always be before the AYord, in the Word, 
and by the "Word, that we seek this divine Spirit. It is 
by it that he acts; by it that he enlightens and affects; 
by it that he casts down and raises up. His constant 
work is to make it understood by our souls, to apply it 
to them, and to make them love it. 

The Bible, then, is in all its parts from God. 

Still, no doubt, we shall have to meet with many 
passages of which we shall fail to perceive either the 
use or the beauty; but the light of the last day will ere- 
long bring out their now hidden radiance. And as in 
the case of those deep crystalline caves, into which 
torches have been brought, after having been long con- 
signed to darkness, the daAvning of the day of Jesus 
Christ, bathing all things in a flood of light, will pierce 
into every part of the Scriptures, revealing every where 
gems unseen till then, and causing them to dazzle us 
with innumerable splendours. Then will the beauty, 
the wisdom, the proportions, the harmony of all their 
revelations be manifested; and the prospect wdll fill the 
elect with ravishing admiration, with ever fresh raptures, 
with unutterable joy. 

In this respect, the history of the past ought to lead 
us to anticipate that of the future; and we may judge, 
from what has already taken place, of the flood of light 
'• 1 Cor. ii i4. 



'0 CONCLUSION. 



which we may look to see poured upon the Scriptures 
at the second coming of Jesus Christ. 

Behold what beams of liA^ing light were at once dif- 
fused over all parts of the Old Testament, at the first 
advent of the Son of God; and from this sole fact try 
to form an idea of what will be the splendour of both 
Testaments, at his second appearance. Then will God's 
plan be consummated, then will our Lord and our King, 
*' fairer than any of the sons of men," be revealed from 
heaven, upborne on the word of truth, meekness, and 
righteousness; then shall his brightness fill the hearts 
of the redeemed; and the awful grandeur of the work 
of redemption burst in all its glory on the contempla- 
tion of the children of God. 

Mark how many chapters of Scripture, even as early 
as the age of Jeremiah, or later, during the long reign 
of the Maccabees, and during the whole time that the 
second temple lasted, from Malachi to Jobn the Bap- 
tist; mark, we say, how many chapters of the Scripture, 
now radiant for us with the divinest lustre, must have 
then appeared vapid and meaningless to rationalistic 
men in the ancient synagogue. How childish, com- 
monplace, senseless, and useless must have seemed to 
them so many verses and so many chapters that now 
nourish our faith, that fill us with wonder at the ma- 
jestic unity of the Scriptures, that compel us to weep, 
and that have ere now led so many weary and heavy- 
laden souls to the feet of Jesus Christ ! What would 
people say then of the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah ? — 
Doubtless, with the Ethiopian of Queen Candace : — 
" How can I understand except some man should 
guide me ? Of whom speaketh the prophet this ? of 
himself, or some other man?" What purpose seems 
likely to be served by this mysterious history of Mel- 
chizedec? Why these long details about the tabernacle, 
Aaron's garments, things clean and unclean, worship, 
and sacrifices ? What meaning could there he in the 
words — '' Neither shall ye break a bone thereof? " What 
meaning could be attached to the twenty-second, s'xty- 



GROWING RADIANCE OF THE SCRIPTURES. 861 

ninth, and so many other psalms : — "My God, my God, 
why hast thou forsaken me ? " " They have pierced my 
hands and my feet." Why (they must have thought) 
does David occupy himself at such length, in his psalms, 
with the common incidents of his adventurous life? 
When was it, besides, that they parted his garments 
among them, and cast lots on his vesture ? What 
mean those words — " All they that see me shake the 
head, saying. He trusted in the Lord that he would 
deliver him ; let him deliver him, seeing he delighted 
in him?" What, then, is that vinegar, and what is the 
meaning of the gall — " They gave me also gall for my 
meat, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink?" 
And those exaggerated and inexplicable w^ords — " I 
hid not my face from shame and spitting ; they smote 
me on the cheek, and the ploughers ploughed my 
back?" And what would the prophet mean — "Be- 
hold, a virgin shall be with child?" Who, again, is 
that king, lowly, and mounted on an ass : — " Rejoice 
greatly, daughter of Zion ; behold, thy King cometh 
unto thee. He is just, and having salvation; lowly, and 
riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass? " 
What, then, is that sepulture — "And he made his grave 
with the wicked, and with the rich in his death ? " 

How must all these expressions, and many others of 
a like kind, have appeared strange, and little worthy of 
the Lord, to the presumptuous scribes of those remote 
times ! What humanity, would they have said, what 
individuality, what occasionality (to put into the mouths 
of those men of ancient times the language of the pre- 
Bent day) ! They were taught, no doubt, in their aca- 
demies, at that time, learned systems and long conjec- 
tural speculations on the conjunctures in which the 
prophets were placed when writing such details, and no 
more would be seen in their words than the ordinary 
impress of the entirely personal circumstances which 
had given rise to their emotions. 

But what, then, was done by the true disciples of the 
Word of life? How did ye act, Hezekiah, Daniel, 



362 CONCLUSION. 



Josiah, Nehemiah, Ezra — our brethren in the same 
hope and in the same faith ? and ye, too, holy women, 
who hoped in God, and waited for the consolation of 
Israel ? Ah ! ye bowed with respect over all those 
depths, as the angels of light still do ; and desiring to 
see them to the bottom, ye waited ! Yes, they waited ! 
They knew that in what was the most insignificant 
passage in their eyes, there might be, as was said by 
one of the church fathers, " mountains of doctrine." 
Thus it was that in "searching (as Peter has said) 
what the Spirit of Christ, which was in the pro- 
phets, did signify, when it testified beforehand of the 
sufferings of Christ and the glory that should fol- 
low," they never doubted that afterwards, when time 
and events should have passed their hand over this 
sympathetic ink, there would come forth from it won- 
drous pages, all bearing the stamp of divinity, and 
all full of the gospel. The day was to come, after 
the first appearance of the Messiah, when the least 
in the kingdom of God would be greater than the 
greatest of the prophets ; and that day has arrived. 
But we ourselves know, also, that the day is yet to 
come, after his seQond appearance, when the least 
among the redeemed shall be greater in knowledge 
than ever were the Augustines, the Calvins, the Jona- 
than Edwardses, the Pascals, and the Leightons ; for 
then the ears of children will hear, and their eyes will 
see, " things which the apostles themselves desired to 
see and did not see, and to hear and did not hear." 

TV ell, then, what doctors, prophets, and saints used 
to do with passages that were still obscure to them, and 
now luminous to us, we will do with passages that are 
still obscure to us, but which will erelong be luminous 
to the heirs of life, when all the prophecies will be ac- 
complished, and when Jesus Christ will nppt^ar in the 
cloufls, in the last epiphany of his glorious advent. 

What lustre, as soon as it has been perceived, have 
we not seen shed on many a passage, many a psalm, 
many a prophecy, many a type, many a description, 



LIGHTS OF GRACE AND GLORY. 363 

the profound beauty of which had until then passed 
unobserved ! What a wondrous gospel has there not 
emanated from them ! what appeals to the conscience ! 
what a display of the love shown in redemption ! Let 
us wait, then, for analogous revelations, but much more 
glorious still, on the day when our Master shall de> 
scend again from the heavens; " for in the Scriptures," 
says Irenaus, " there are some difficulties which even at 
present we can resolve by the grace of God ; but there 
are others which we leave to him, not only for this age 
but for the age which is to come, in order that God 
may perpetually teach, and man also perpetually learn 
from God the things that are God's." -^ 

If the lights of grace have eclipsed those of nature, 
how shall the lights of glory, in their turn, eclipse those 
of grace ? How many stars of the first magnitude, as 
yet unseen by us, shall, at the approach of that great 
day, be kindled in the firmament of the Scriptures ? 
and when, at last, it shall have arisen without a cloud 
over the ransomed world, what harmonies, what celes- 
tial tints, what new glories, what unlooked-for splen- 
dours, shall burst upon the heirs of eternal life ! 

Then will be seen the meaning of many a prophecy, 
many a fact, and many a lesson, the divinity of which, 
as yet, reveals itself only in detached traits; but the 
evangelical beauties of w^hich will shine forth from every 
part of them. Then w^ill be known the entire bearing 
of those parables, even now so solemnizing, — of the fig 
tree, of the master returning from a far country, of the 
bridegroom and the bride, of the net drawn to the shore 
of eternity, of Lazarus, of the invited to the feast, of 
the talents, of the vine dressers, of the virgins, of the 
marriage feast. Then will there be known all the glory 
involved in such expressions as the following : — " The 
Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, 
until I make thine enemies thy footstool." "Thy 
people, Lord, shall be willing in the day of thy power, 

1 Irenaeus, Adv. Hger. lib. ii. cap. 47: "Iv« i 0t»,- hidie-xn, ivO^oiroi i\ 



364 CONCLUSION. 



in the beauties of holiness from the womb of the morn- 
ing: thou hast the dew of thy youth." " He shall strike 
through kings in the day of his wrath." " He shall 
drink of the brook in the way ; therefore shall he lift 
up the head." 

Then, also, shall our eyes behold, in all his glory, 
Jesus Christ, the Saviour, the Comforter, and the Friend 
of the wretched, our Lord and our God ! He that liveth 
and was dead, and is alive for evermore ! Then all the 
science of the heavens will be summed up in him. This 
was ever all the science of the Holy Ghost, who cometh 
down from heaven ; it was all the science of the Scrip- 
tures, for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.^ 
It is even now all the life of the saints ; " their life 
eternal is to know him !" 

The celebrated traveller, who first brought to us from 
Constantinople the only horse-chestnut that the West 
had ever seen, and who planted it, they say, in the 
court of his mansion-house, could he have told all that 
he held in his hand, and all that was to come forth from 
it ? — The infinite in the finite ! forests innumerable in 
a humble nut, and within its insignificant shell trees 
in thousands, adorning with their majestic foliage and 
bunches of flowers our gardens and shrubberies, dark- 
ening with their shade our public squares, and the ter- 
races and avenues of our cities ; people celebrating their 
national festivals under their ample bowers ; our chil- 
dren playing at their feet, and the house sparrow twit- 
tering to its mate in their branches ; whilst each of those 
trees will itself produce, year after year, thousands of 
nuts similar to that from which it sprung, and all like- 
wise bearing in them the imbedded germs of countless 
forests in countless generations ! 

Thus the Christian traveller, on passing from the 
church militant into his heavenly country, into the city 
of his God, to his Father's house, with one of the thou- 
sand passages of the Holy Bible in his hands, knows 
that in that he brings the infinite in the finite — a <rerm 
1 Rev. six. 10. 



THE INFINITE IN THE FINITE. 366 

from God, of the developments and the glory of which 
he may doubtless even now have a glimpse, but all the 
grandeurs of which he cannot yet tell. Possibly it may 
be the smallest of seeds ; but he knows that there is to 
come forth from it a mighty tree, an eternal tree, under 
the branches of which the inhabitants of heaven will 
take shelter. As to many of these passages he can as 
yet, perhaps, see no more than their germ lying within 
a rough shell ; but he knows, at the same time, that 
once admitted to the Jerusalem that is from above, 
under the bright effulgence of the Sun of Righteousness, 
he will see beaming in those words of wisdom, on their 
being brought to the light of which the Lamb is the 
everlasting source, splendours now latent, and still en- 
closed in their first envelopment. Then it is that in an 
ineffable melting of the heart with gratitude and felicity, 
he will discover agreements, harmonies, and glories, 
which here below he but dimly saw or waited to see 
with lowly reverence. Prepared in God's eternal coun- 
sels before the foundation of the world, and enclosed 
as germs in his Word of life, they will burst forth under 
that new heaven, and for that new earth wherein will 
dwell righteousness. 

The whole written Word, therefore, is inspired by 
God. 

" Open thou mine eyes, Lord, that I may behold 
wondrous things out of thy law !" 



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i:aj)ie's a^'ajltticax coxcohdaxce of the mozt 

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MACITETT'S C03T3rENTAIiT OJV TnE ORTOIKAL TEXT OJT 
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T:E[E GJ.rSSEX'S bible ; ITS DIVIXE OBIGIX AXD IXSPl- 
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DILLAJrAT'S BOJfAJX AXTIQZITIES AX'H AXCIEXT MT- 
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TJie Bible and the Closet. Edited by Rev. J. O. Choules, D. D. 

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